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Free drugs from your faucet How did tiny amounts of nearly every drug under the sun get into our drinking water -- and what are they doing to us?

- - - - - - - - - - - - By Mark D. Uehling

Oct. 25, 2001 | Suppose that three summers ago, in 1999, you lived in Atlanta and drank the water. Any idea what was in the water? Traces of caffeine, nicotine and Tylenol.

Atlanta is not unique -- the anecdote could be about any American city, and include nearly any palette of drugs you might imagine. The U.S. water supply is laced with residues of hundreds of medicinal and household chemicals, compounds that originate not at a Dow Chemical drainage pipe but from our own personal plumbing. The contaminants come from our bladders and bowels, our bathtub drains and kitchen sinks. As much as 90 percent of anything the doctor orders you to swallow passes out of your body and into your toilet. Wastes from farm animals are never treated -- and loaded with antibiotics and fertility hormones. As chemists make new concoctions, the water supply takes the hit.

The good news is that there is no acute peril, as there is from fecal bacteria or mercury. The medicine in our water is not present at levels that will produce immediate effects. We're talking about a few parts per billion or trillion of drugs like Paxil, Keflex or amoxicillin.

But the daily ingestion of these unprescribed nanococktails does pose potential long-term perils. The presence of trace amounts of antibiotics in the water supply may lead to resistant strains of bacteria. Vanishingly small doses of steroids and other chemicals may interfere with reproductive systems in all living creatures. And the cumulative effect of combinations of chemicals over long periods of time is unpredictable.

U.S. officials are uneasy discussing these dangers. So are water utilities. For now, nothing is being done to limit drugs in the water supply. Authorities say the threat isn't sufficiently clear, that they cannot justify taking action without more conclusive research data, and that the total concentrations of such chemicals is too small to worry about. But in Europe, especially in Germany, serious efforts to clean up the water supply have already begun.

Here in the United States, the full scope of the problem is about to loom larger. At a conference held in Minneapolis in early October, a gusher of new data was presented at the 2nd International Conference on Pharmaceuticals and Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in Water.

There scientists learned what they had long suspected. Advil, caffeine and a nicotine byproduct called cotinine are routinely detected in U.S. water supplies. River and lake samples have come back with a variety of antibiotics, antidepressants, antacids, heart drugs, you name it. The EPA, for instance, reported that children in Ohio and North Carolina are drinking diluted levels of atrazine, a popular agricultural herbicide known to interfere with brain and reproductive tissues in lab experiments. In Kansas, Vermont and other states, experts are finding a potent industrial byproduct called nonylphenol. It originates in just about every shampoo, detergent or cologne in your home. In Louisiana, scientists found Tylenol and birth control hormones.

The list is long and troubling. An engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, David Sedlak, estimates there are 129 widely used drugs in municipal wastewater nationwide, 49 at levels above a key cutoff point for potential regulation.

It turns out that both natural processes and our low-tech sewage treatment processes don't completely clean up the drugs that we excrete. Reduced to their essence, most water-treatment plants remove the solid stuff and partly purify the liquid remainder before sending it into the environment. Only later, at some other facility downstream, will the water be rendered suitable for drinking. Everyone is downstream from someone.

Remainder of article here

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2001

Answers

Great article and much on our minds.

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2001

"Everyone is downstream from someone."

Well, not quite, but very tempting for the cities along the major waterways to use those waterways for drinking.

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2001

I've been drinking distilled water for many, many years now. Maybe I should switch to city water and get some of those drugs in me. Maybe buildup my immune system..........can't stand the thought of it....Damn, I don't even put bleach in my tap water stash, the smell of chlorine is overwhelming! How do people drink that crap?

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2001