A soup of pharmaceutical waste spews from the faucets supplying drinking water to 41 million Americans, according to a disturbing study from the Associated Press. At least 24 major cities are affected, including New York, Washington, Boston Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Here are some of the key test results obtained by the AP:
- Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.
- Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.
- Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.
- A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.
- The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.
- Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.
The situation is undoubtedly worse than suggested by the positive test results in the major population centers documented by the AP.
What Exactly Is In My Drinking Water?
Drugs. Lots of drugs. Trace amounts of the prescriptions we take and the steroids we inject into cattle are winding their way into our water supply. When we (or our eventual steak dinner) can’t fully metabolize a pharmaceutical, it passes straight through us, past treatment plans, and back into the ground until we (or our cow friend) drink it up. Detected drugs include: “antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones.”
Ok, Drinking Water Is Bad. I Can Switch To Bottled Water, Right?
No. Bottled water is drinking water suspended in a wasteful plastic shell. Like municipalities, water bottlers don’t test for pharmaceuticals. Home filtration systems are equally useless against drugs.
Um, Ok. There Is No Escape. Am I Safe?
Eh, maybe. Scientists aren’t exactly sure, but the research isn’t encouraging. Pharmaceuticals, unlike general pollutants, are specifically designed to futz with the human body. “…recent studies—which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public—have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.” ‘Alarming effects’ means that cancers grow faster, kidney cells stop regenerating, and heart cells become cranky and inflamed.
This Sucks. What Is The Government Doing?
Ah yes, the government. Maybe they can offer an encouraging and meaningful response? Let’s turn for reassurance to Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water:
“We recognize it is a growing concern and we’re taking it very seriously.”
@#$%!
AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water [ABC]
(Photo: Getty)
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@burgundyyears: Hey Art Bell is all that and then some.
I hear news stories sometimes months or weeks before they break in the mainstream news.
Art Bell apologists on Consumerist… wow. Now I’ve seen it all.
@klusta: LOL! me too. *hides*
Oh my god!! There are chemicals and drugs in our water, our food, our air! Medical care is awful and we can’t afford it. We don’t eat healthy, and don’t exercise enough. All of this is going to kill us!!!
Oh wait, you say average life expectancy is longer now than it’s ever been? How could that possibly be true with all of these hazards waiting to strike us down at any minute.
More scare-mongering reporting from your liberal friends in the media who know you won’t read what they say unless they scare the cr@p out of you!
@Jackasimov: I commented on your let the market sort it out comment, and then spoke about the mass of the population who really doesn’t care about the environment, and yes these crackpots are dumping their medicines into the water supply.
I also direct my comments to crackpots who think that a bit of pharmaceuticals in the water supply isn’t so bad, that it isn’t a crucial public health problem demanding a response from a sane population.
I’m not worried, Uncle Sam is very concerned, seriously!
Wait wait, does this apply to Poland Springs which does NOT come from the public water supply? That’s what I drink – what do you guys think?
CAPT. JACK: I can taste it. Estrogen. Definitely estrogen. You take the pill, flush it away, and it enters the water cycle, feminizes the fish. Goes all the way up into the sky, then falls all the way back down onto me. Contraceptives in the rain. I love this planet. Still, at least I won’t get pregnant. Never doing that again.
welp…. our civilization has pretty much altered EVERYTHING. we’ve transported plants and animals… as well as ourselves…. from all corners of the planet to the other, carrying non-native organisms, altering ecosystems, causing extinctions.
every product we ‘man-make’ creates some kind of ‘waste’. electrical, elemental and biological. herding animals, burning fuels, building homes. human kind has been altering the planet since day one, and it will only become more evident. now genetic cloning and mutation takes this all to deeper level.
“best part is”… there is really no way to prevent things like this. this is the kind of long term consequences that we ‘never thought about’, nor ‘could have thought’ of when this stuff was being made.
just like the attack of the monster movie radioactive ants, they always say “we had no idea this would happen”.
interesting to see that man-made chemistry can exist that long.
No wonder virus and cold germs are becoming resistant to anti-bodies its because we are ingesting the antiboiotics every day.
I wouldnt complain much if they started putting Xanax in the water at least people would be less prone to start shit and be more mellow.
OMG reminds me of the movie serenity and we all know what happened to the people on that planet.
So let me ask some rhetorical questions:
Could it be that the drugs which are the most poorly absorbed are the ones which end up at highest levels in the water supply? Wouldn’t they then be equally poorly absorbed from water?
Considering that long-term build up requires fat-solubility, what would you expect to happen with these compounds?
Could we maybe give the people whose job it is to study this stuff a chance to work out what the risk really is before going all “OMG THINK OF TEH CHILDREN!!1!”
Do realize how much water you need to drink to ingest one pill’s worth of pharmaceuticals? More than you drink now, trust me. Imbibe in one Diet Coke and you’ve swallowed a much larger volume of interesting chemicals than you have to worry about from your tap water.
I have friends doing their grad school research on this stuff, and talking with them, this article seems pretty sensationalist. The biggest concern are the environmental implications; the whole environmental estrogen issue in fish, etc.
This is on the front page of CNN today in the top stories…
@greensmurf: No, viruses and cold germs (which are themselves viruses) are resistant to antibiotics because they are viruses and not bacteria. Wow.
Thats all fine and swell, but can they tell me if peanut oil was used in my chinese food?
.
I wasn’t that concerned with this at first, thinking that the concentrations were pretty low. But then I found out that the maximum allowable lead concentration in water is 15 ppb. That’s pretty low, too. And lead isn’t a synthesized material.
Heard on NPR’s Air Talk that the amounts are measurable in parts per trillion.
One of the reps for LA Water did a good job of context, since we’re not wired to deal with numbers that large (small). To get one adult dose, you would have to drink the equivalent of twenty two Olympic-sized swimming pools of water. A day.
So, while I think there should be an education effort to tell people to not dump their meds in the sink or toilet, I don’t think there’s much that reasonable people should do. The reporting on this seems a tad sensationalistic.
Ah, great. More news you can use… to become a tinfoil-hatted whack job.
Oh snap!!! They’re taking it seriously
If anyone actually read the rest of the article. They would know that water filtration systems apparently aren’t good enough to take out all pharmaceuticals, and that would they are hypothesizing is that the drugs in many ways might be coming from our urine and excrement because not all of the drugs are absorbed into the body. This is very bad.
What does this mean for homeopathy?
Seriously, you can’t say it’s dangerous, but you can’t say it’s safe either, especially over long term exposure. What really needs to be addressed is the paradigm of “the solution to pollution is dilution”.
The Scare-Hedge cycle is very rhythmic in this article. A few quotes, in order of appearance:
SCARE1: “A vast array of pharmaceuticals…have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.”
HEDGE1: “To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose”
SCARE2: “Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings…”
HEDGE2: “And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals,…
SCARE3: “…recent studies have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.”
RE: Scare3: of HOW LOW of levels…are they comparable to those found in the study? The lack of comparison during a 5-MONTH study seems either incompetent or the results would inconveniently nullify the scare.
The article has several more scares and hedges throughout.
The goals of the Hedged Scare article are the same big three as most leftist media:
1) Scare as much as possible
2) Increase readership
3) Make more government look like the best alternative
Can I get an Amen?
@ExecutorElassus: Fluoride is the only thing holding my teeth together. I not only drink fluoridated water but use a fluoridated rinse twice a day.
@hwyengr: I’m not any kind of a doctor, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the reason the limits for heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury, etc.) are so low is because they build up in the body and aren’t evacuated…through various means.
I’m not saying that all the pharmaceuticals they’re identifying ARE evacuated, but a good deal of them likely are since they identify human waste as one of the sources of water contamination.
“Homer, the walls are melting again!”
Well that must explain why I never really get any pains, infections, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness or heart problems!
@DownwardSpiral: Exactly… you know the next step is going to be that they report that all traces of pharmaceuticals have been removed from the water supply, followed by an immediate spike in disease rates in all major cities.
@JimmyDaGeek, BugMeNot2: Thank you.
@larry_y: If homeopathy were actual science, and the priciples it clings to were actually real (BIG “if”s there, then we should all be pretty pain-free and good to go. After all, the more you dilute, the stronger the dose, according to those quacks. One part per trillion acetomiophin should help my headache, right?
I can’t work out an emphatic way to roll my eyes through the computer screen so it can be seen, but rest assured, I’m trying.
Wow, full of typos. I lose.
Also, @Dervish: what do you think your kidneys are for?
Don’t Reverse Osmosis systems work for filtering this out? Thought I read that in the original AP article. Except most home reverse osmosis system are highly inefficient . . wasting 10-15gallons of water for every 3 gallons fully filtered… [which I don't understand].
@aphex242: Good point. I took growth hormone for two years due to short stature (I wasn’t just being vain – I was actually tested and they found that my pituitary was not producing HGH properly). I was 102 pounds when I started out and didn’t have any problems. Fast forward a few short years later and I had gained about 90 pounds and I have a TON of hormonal problems now – elevated testosterone levels (I am female), polycystic ovary syndrome, multiple cysts throughout my body (brain, ovarian, and breast), etc.
No longer thirsy…..I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
@Luddhunter: Good analysis of the article, not so smashing (IMO) of the conclusion. Why blame left/right when simple blind, irresponsible ambition on the part of writers and editors suffice?
So… Where did you think it all went after you pissed it out? This isn’t exactly knew, toxicologists have known this for years. We actually had a good laugh about it during my class.