We’re drinking what?
Los Angeles may have the best tasting municipal drinking water, according to recent taste tests, but it doesn’t mean the water is free from drugs. Say what?
Well, probably not cocaine or heroin, but legal pharmaceuticals, both used and unused, are showing up in municipal water systems from Los Angeles to New Jersey, according to a five-month investigation by the Associated Press published Monday.
Are water utilities required by law to test for this type of pollution? No. And the few that do are reluctant to release their findings because they fear the public won’t know how to interpret the information and may be unduly alarmed.
This would be me. I’m duly alarmed about the possibility of ingesting drugs I wouldn’t even take the first time around. And what about drug interactions? Is someone’s Prozac interacting with someone else’s Zanex? Do they cancel each other out? Good grief.
And if you think you’re safe because you only drink bottled water, think again. Think pasta, vegetables and coffee made with tap water. Your designer water may be just repackaged tap water and isn’t subject to federal regulation. It doesn’t even have to divulge its source. “Spring” water may have sprung from the Colorado River and never been near a spring.
So how do the remains of someone else’s prescription wind up in your highball? Well, a certain amount of any medication leaves the body unmetabolized and is flushed into the waste stream. Most wastewater treatment doesn’t remove it. And reverse osmosis purification systems, like Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment system, waste a huge amount of water even though the result is near-distilled quality.
Although drug concentrations-including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones-found in drinking water all over the country are small (measured in parts per billion), scientists are worried about the long-term consequences of so many prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications on human health.
A column that appeared in these pages last November addressed the problem of “superbugs,” those antibiotic resistant staph germs plaguing hospitals and nursing homes. I was not the first to write about the danger of drug resistance. Laurie Garrett warned of it in “The Coming Plague” published in 1994. After that, notices were circulated among doctors and healthcare facilities that antibiotics should not be prescribed for viral infections, flu and earaches in children. Hospital patients recovering from injury or surgery were succumbing to pneumonia or other resistant bacterial infections.
At the time, I reported that some hospitals and pharmacies were beginning to make a concerted effort to educate the public about safe disposal of medications. Their unlikely partner in this campaign, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which was seeing the result of unused drugs flushed into streams and rivers where they produce transgender fish among other abnormalities.
The AP investigating team reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. They also surveyed the nation’s 50 largest cities and a dozen other water providers in all 50 states.
Philadelphia officials reported 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water and 63 in the city’s watersheds. In Southern California, anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people. U.S. Geological Survey researchers analyzed drinking water at a treatment plant serving 859,000 people in New Jersey; a sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.
The investigation also indicates that watersheds, a natural source of most of the nation’s water supply, are also contaminated.
Now, doctors believe our bodies may shrug off a relatively big one-time dose, yet suffer from a smaller amount delivered continuously over years, possibly causing allergies or nerve damage. They just don’t know.
But when it comes to the environment it’s already a serious story. Fish are not only developing sexual abnormalities, whole colonies of aquatic plants are dying off. Wildlife that drink from streams are subjected to pharmaceutical residue in their only available water source. Where once we were concerned about pesticide and herbicide runoff, we now have a whole new problem. Estrogen and other hormones have been linked to cancers. And as Americans take more prescription medications every year, the problem will only get worse.
So what do we do? If bottled water isn’t the answer, home filtration systems may not be any better. And where boiling water has been recommended for killing bacterial contamination, that’s not likely to get rid of drugs.
I admit I have a small collection of unused medications prescribed to me after surgery three years ago. I didn’t want to flush them, as we were once advised to do, because I feared they would migrate through the septic tank into the groundwater. Some hospitals and pharmacies will take them back for disposal. That’s a start.
As for bottled water, I gave that up long ago. Too many plastics to recycle, too many germs growing in hot cars. I’ve added Brita filters to every tap.
Thanks, AP, for the info. Nice job. Now tell me what to do about it.