Coffee-Drinking Provides Raw Sewage Red Flag - Yahoo! News:
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How many cups of coffee have you had today? A new study finds that your caffeine habit could provide a red flag to alert authorities of sewer leaks and overflows.
About 3 percent of caffeine from coffee, chocolate, tea and energy drinks ends up in the sewer system, excreted through human urine. In urban areas where the only source of caffeine is human urine, high levels of the compound in rivers or other bodies of water (where human urine and feces should not be present) are signs of contamination by fecal coliform bacteria, the new research finds.
"If fecal coliforms come from human sewage, they will come with caffeine," study researcher Sébastien Sauvé, an environmental chemist at the University of Montreal, told LiveScience. "So if we find caffeine, that means it came from sanitary contamination."
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