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Drugs In Our Drinking Water
MikeURL alerts to a AP story just published after a months-long investigation on the vast array of pharmaceuticals present in US drinking water. These include antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones, as well as over-the-counter drugs. Quoting: "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. Also, utilities insist their water is safe. But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health."
Really? Shit sure doesn't seem to be working on my wife.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
I'd like to see the levels present in the average American's blood-stream.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
What! no LSD yet? When will these lazy hippies finally get to it?
Hello everyone. This is a simple solution for "fixing" this problem - Move upstream!
I have 3000 acres of pure wilderness located at the head of a major river. If you are interested I am selling it off at 1 dollar per square foot.
Have a nice drug-free life there!
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I fail to see the problem. However, what I do see is a pink elephant running across my living room carpet as I write this. The good news is that I am very calm as I know the purple dolphins in my kitchen will protect me.
They're corrupting our precious bodily fluids!
Who cares what the drugs are doing to are water? I'm more concerned with what the queers are doing to the soil.
Just think of the consequences if homeopathic remedies - which are supposed to work better with minuscule quantities of an "active" ingredient - get into our drinking water, too?
Whenever I hear folks talking on the subject of bottled water vs. tap water, or water quality in general, I'm reminded of a study (which I'm too lazy to look up) conducted by a network news show a few years back. Turned out that bottled water was much less sanitary and clean than tap water.
Why? Because tap water has teams of people objectively surveying its quality, unmotivated by profit. And bottled water has very little regulation, at least when measured against the regulation required around tap water.
I, for one, drink either tap water or filtered tap water. These bottled water companies can take a hike, as far as I'm concerned.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
According to supporters of Homeopathy, we'll all become incredibly healthy thanks to this!
lol, think a bit.
Hints:
1- It not put directly into the drinking water
2- It involves toilets
They get thrown out in sewage, and nobody thought of actually filtering those biologically active molecules before putting them in an aqueduct. It just means some engineers need to get cracking for a proper filter, or maybe just fine tuning an existing one.
And what will they worry about when we can measure parts per trillion?
Deleted
It might be far below a medical dose, but the question is: Why are they putting it in drinkwater in the first place?
They're not. The drugs end up in the reprocessing loop because people throw them down the drain or flush them down the toilet, and the filtration systems currently in place don't get rid of all of them. Makes you wonder if bottled water is any better, or if there's any way to filter the water more thoroughly yourself. Would distillation and activated-charcoal filtering do the trick?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_filtering
Also informing people that what goes down the toilet goes in your drinking water.
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue. That's just ridiculous, when you think about the number of "X milligram of ingredient Y" pills people must be taking for detectable amounts to be showing up in drinking water after being diluted and filtered that many times. Is the average American really on that many drugs? Or are these water companies just really bad at keeping sewage out of people's taps?
Hrm. I wonder how this compares to other developed nations...
would seem to be a much bigger problem for most of us.
And if you're vegetarian, the metal-laden mining tailings that are commonly used as fertilizer can't be a good thing.
you would have to show how much of it was from drinking the water...
What kind of effect will this have on drug tests? Mythbusters and Brainiac both showed that poppy seeds from regular bread will trigger a positive drug test for opiates I think.
With amphetamines etc. in the drinking water, what will that do for drug tests on otherwise clean people?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
What drugs?
What water supplies?
And how can I buy some of the water?
Let me be the first one to welcome our free-drug distributing overlords!
Well, I've never seen no plants grow in the toilet.
Even cyanide will not significantly affect you in proportions of a few parts per billion. You get a lot more than that from a handful of almonds. As for parts per trillion... just forget it. It isn't worth bothering about.
If you want something to worry about, then start worrying about the antibiotics and growth hormones used in cattle and chickens. That is something real, with documented effects.
In the Netherlands this is known for years. I believe that here Prozac is the drug that is most found in the water.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
TORCHWOOD 1X01: EVERYTHING CHANGES
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Filtration is set by standards. What isn't legislated probably does not get filtered because of extra cost. They'll be removing ecoli etc, but probably quite a few unregulated contaminants flow through.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's obviously the handy work of the commies.
You do not need to drop pills in the toilet!
It's from the piss from all the legal drug addict the pharmaceutical companies created.
How do the drugs get into the water?
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
That explains so much.....
The article mentions this:
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
Of course, this doesn't even cover people discarding left over pills in the toilet.
Really, it's just another example of a multi-billion dollar industry making huge profits while not being responsible for the waste stream they create.
Then again, I'm sure they can just make a pill for all of us to take on a daily basis that will neutralize the effects of all these other drugs in our water supply.
What's the biodegradability of this stuff? All we need is some modern version of DDT, working its way up the food chain.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Distillation is the method which produces the purest drinking water possible, since it involves boiling the water, then recondensing the steam back to water.
The downsides to distillation is that it is expensive in terms of energy, and the crap left behind after distilling lots of water can be difficult to clean out of your distillation vessel.
If you're going to include a charcoal filter, I'd put it before the distiller so you'd have a little less crap to eventually scrape out of your boiling vessel.
This is another perfect example about how new media can't understand technology.
In this case, the technology is advanced chemical analysis machines that can detect trace amounts of drugs.
In fact, it can detect trace amounts of whatever chemical it happens to be programmed to find if the trace amounts are present.
The key word here is trace, as in a few hundred thousand or less Molecules.
But give these jokers the opportunity to combine the words 'detect' and 'drugs', and they turn into self-righteous raving lunatics predicting the end of civilization and, by implication of the word 'drugs', millions of crazed niggers and hippies running amok, which is what the word 'drugs' means to the media fear mongers.
Since the level of the trace amounts detected is so far below the effective medical dose to have any effect on human behavior or physiology, then why are they reporting it as if it were some kind of imminent problem?
And, what, pray tell, is exactly so new about this situation? These trace amounts of (oh, horrors!) 'drugs' seem to have always been in the environment. What's new is not their presence, it's the ability to detect molecular levels of them.
But the news media is presenting this as a warning that some terrible thing is about to happen. But it's not. This is a non-story being 'fear amplified' by the news media who are extremely limited in the real stories that they are allowed to cover by their corporate owners. So they just pander to vague fears.
To hell with them. They are not professionals anymore, nor do they have anything resembling credibility left.
And I am all so sick and tired of normal healthy productive people being fired from their jobs just because molecular trace amounts of 'drugs' turn up in the body fluids that they have been forced to surrender against the 4th and 5th ammendment of the US constitution that we are suspossed to live under in the USA.
So you invented a machine that can 'prove' that someone smoked weed a month ago and therefore you can legally use this 'evidence' as an excuse to destroy their life? Well, fuck you and your machine. You are an asshole and a fascist and you are not doing your company, your people, or your country any favors by pretending otherwise.
Have a nice day!
Oh the fun things that are in the water.
And to think, I never got the chance to be part of the A.R.G.
It turns out We are living it.
On a side note, this is old news. I've seen it several times. It is news to sell water filtration systems which block out heavy metals like mercury and lead, but have no effect whatsoever in filtering out all the lithium and all the other drugs which don't contain heavy metals. (What kind of idiot would make you want to swallow medicine with lead or mercury in it?)
Next we will here about how there are GERMS in the water.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I, for one, welcome our new burrow owl overlords.
Years ago most drinking water in towns was too bad to drink unless you lived in the country near to a good spring. Hence the invention of beer. My advice is stop drinking water and just go for beer, wine and spirits instead.
Purity Of Essence
Peace On Earth
Damn Russians and their evil water contamination schemes !
Send the nuuuuukes (and you should stop worrying about the Bomb)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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.
Now we know how the theory of "Intelligent Design" has gained the amount of acceptance that it has.
Hint: Its not a Troll when its true.
Jesus was an invention of the Romans - watch "The Pharmacractic Inquisition" for something more credible...
Rejoice! just as it was in the Middle Ages, soon we all will drink nothing but beer.
Sure, this is concerning to me because of how long all these chemicals survive and re-enter the water supply. Perhaps, this isn't even new News (fish on birth control -see here), but what concerns me is what about the other stuff that we introduce into our food/water supplies that is at higher concentrations? e.g., bovine hormones.
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Lord, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?
General Jack D. Ripper: Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.
General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Imagine hiking up into the woods, and coming across a pristine lake. The lake is 6 meters deep, and 170 meters in diameter. Into this lake you toss a single, 100 milligram aspirin tablet.
You have now polluted the lake with aspirin at 1 part per trillion.
This is fear-mongering at its finest. Why, we have DRUGS and COMPOUNDS and CHEMICALS in our water! We simply MUST pass MORE LAWS and INCREASE TAXES to purify your drinking water! You could be getting LETHAL DOSES of DRUGS if we don't do SOMETHING! And for those of you living on private property, well we HAVE TO CONTROL what you can do on your property EVEN BEYOND what's done now, because you could be polluting the aquifer by simply dropping a single aspirin tablet on to your lawn!
Never mind you'd have to drink a few million liters of water to even get 1 milligram of the drug...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The Russians are contaminating our water through their toilets?!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Water the disclaimers for water now? May cause liver spots, thirst, anal leakage, near death experiences, etc..
As was stated, it's not because the water companies are paid to drug us, just so many people are taking these drugs that when people defecate and urinate, guess what enters the main water supplies? Most current filtering systems weren't designed with drugs in such a concentration in mind. I remember reading an article a few months back about estrogen being so small a particle it is virtually impossible to trap, eventually to cause problems because not only do people take estrogen supplements (albeit to a lesser extent than testosterone), but women keep passing it through natural methods. Personally, I think 90% of these drugs people take are excessive. I'm perfectly healthy and don't take any drugs, except an occasional ibuprofen, whereas a friend of mine is perfectly healthy and is on constant drugs. People need to learn the concept of placebo again (counterintuitive, maybe), they need to change the way they think about medications and their lifestyles. All this medication is ridiculous and unnecessary in most cases. The same principal applies- put shit in, get shit out.
This has been a health concern for a while, especially with the possibility of drug interactions.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
is to equip every home's septic system with an incinerator
that's not happening
luckily, this whole issue isn't really a problem. we all have radon in our homes too. that competes with any of these substances on a scale of worry. however, if the concentrations are low enough, the concentrations shouldn't worry you. this whole issue is nothing but sensationalism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Whatever you might think of *me*, this guy is dead on - esp. with his last paragraph.
LJ
Jesus was an invention of the Romans - watch "The Pharmacractic Inquisition" for something more credible...
Don't worry about a few parts per quadrillion of who the heck knows what.
You should worry about the massive amounts of fluoride that is being placed deliberately in our drinking water despite many known dangers. This extremely toxic and dangerous substance is being put into our water in massive quantities, on purpose, allegedly to help our teeth.
We're going to grant your wish -- we'll show you a world without sin.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
DDT is still allowed as well as illegally used in many places in the world. Do you know where your food comes from? In the USA, after banning DDT it was still for a long time in all the food being imported central/south america into the USA (don't know how much there is today and if I'd trust the official information on it.)
There are other chemicals as well being used. Not to mention the over farming and genetic plants that may not be causing direct problems (yet) but may cause many indirect ones. We almost had a serious problem with bananas years back because everybody was using the same plant and the others were in such low numbers... but thats another issue.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Well, I wouldn't worry yet:
1. Let's start with the easy stuff first, with the ibuprofen and opiates and whatnot.
For a starter, your organism is already good at dealing with stuff that doesn't belong there. The liver alone gets rid of maybe three quarters of the medicines ever invented. Infinitesimal doses of even some pretty toxic stuff don't really get to do much damage or addiction or whatever, before they're neutralized or filtered out.
But for what you ask, pretty much you just have to make the following distinction:
A) Those who don't cause addiction, i.e., the over-the-counter stuff, well, those don't matter. The organism doesn't compensate in the other direction for those, or not for long. But if you're worried anyway, read on, the reason to not worry is:
B) Those which do cause addiction... well, those don't matter either when measured in parts per trillion.
Physiological addiction is when the body adjusts in the other direction. E.g., a cigarette makes you feel good, among other things, because it inhibits MAO-B, which is to say: works much the same as antidepressant medication. But your body gradually adjusts by producing _more_ MAO-B to get back to the normal baseline. Due to this adjustment, now you feel shitty without them, and eventually you need your smoke even just to get where a non-smoker is without them. That's addiction.
Well, the reason you don't need to worry about those is that your body adjust gradually towards a point that's proportional to the perturbation. If you perturb the system by 0.00000001% in one direction, the "correction" will be at most 0.00000001% in the other direction. If at all.
2. Antibiotics have been around long before humans knew about them. In fact, long before humans even existed. Penicillin, the first discovered antibiotic, is produced naturally by a fungus. (And conversely a bunch of bacteria kill fungi.)
Traces of penicillin were present almost everywhere, if nothing else, because rain got it everywhere. And yet superbugs didn't happen before humans got into antibiotics. Probably evolving the relevant mutations was more of a disadvantage when you _weren't_ on top of a penicillinum patch.
At any rate, to get back to something a bit more certain, infinitesimal traces of antibiotics in the water or in your body, don't create much of an evolutionary pressure. Bacteria _can_ survive one or two broken penicillin-binding proteins, for example because a freak accident made them meet a penicillin-type mollecule in the water. Heck, they lose some now and then even just to C14 decay, plus other natural causes. They'll just produce more of those proteins. That's what they have ribosomes for.
The moment when evolution happens is when there's a clear advantage in having a particular mutation. This typically means having a high chance of ending up dead without it. E.g., when you take antibiotics for a pneumonia, the concentrations there are high enough that a heck of a lot of "unprotected" bacteria just die. That's one heck of a natural selection of those who do have defenses. By contrast, being slightly inconvenienced, and only rarely, by traces of antibiotics in water, doesn't quite count as an evolutionary pressure.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...start running around in circles, screaming. I do wonder what they'll make of this. ;)
You can't handle the tin!
So we have to develope new ways to get same out of our waste water before we release it into the open.
We (as in worldwide) need to take a new hard look at waste water treatment. There are also many new cleaners and other substances that go down the drain. Maybe we should make it into law that if you want to sell something in large quantities that goes down the drain that you also have to supply the water treatment facilities with a way to break that down. In the EU we already have laws that regulate that electronis producers have to take measures to take back the electronics they sold in order to properly recycle it and or take care of it otherwise.
And that's not even looking at it with a microscope!
Hells fire there's more crap than that in your Big Mac than in the water.
Still... I'm drinkin outta of well that we scooped a decomposed squirrel out of last summer. Ummmm um good!
I'm more worried about all the DHMO in the water! There's way more than a few parts per trillion!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
What happened to all the fun tags?
Worse than this, concentrations of the deadly liquid menace DHMO have been detected in concentrations of over 400 parts per million - concentrations far in excess of the amounts they're worried about here. Yet the media refuses to comment upon the horrible and devastating consequences of this fluid toxin, which directly resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 people in 2004 alone!
That's just ridiculous, when you think about the number of "X milligram of ingredient Y" pills people must be taking for detectable amounts to be showing up in drinking water after being diluted and filtered that many times.
Women on birth control. Men on aspirin regimens. Antidepressants. Allergy medications. Over the counter painkillers like tylenol and ibuprofin.
A huge amount of this stuff passes right through our bodies and into the septic system. What about all those bottles of medication that don't get used fully, or sit in your cabinet for those just-in-cases, and then expire? Most people flush the stuff or chuck it in the wastebasket.
If you don't see the problem there, please go read Silent Spring, right now. Or go read about how PCBs made their way from Springfield, MA to the other side of the planet. Now think about how we tell pregnant women not to eat too much tuna, lest they get a dangerous dosage of mercury that could harm their child. Wake up, man.
Please help metamoderate.
I mean, you're right to be worried about the Commie plot to impurify our precious bodily fluids, but fluoride is just the tip of the iceberg. (By the way, the iceberg that sunk the Titanic also contained dangerously high levels of DHMO. Icebergs don't naturally grow to that size except in the presence of DHMO.)
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Richard Dawkins makes an amazing point about the scale of molecules versus day to day objects in Unweaving the Rainbow:
"For example, every time you drink a glass of water you are imbibing at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell"
There are so many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water on the planet that statistically, some bizarre things turn out to be true (assuming even mixing).
So I guess we can add the corollary that:
Every time you drink a glass of water, you are imbibing at least one medication that passed through the bladder of your neighbors.
...don't bogart the faucet, man...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Though, that might explain a few of the neighborhood kids and that damn housekeeper sleeping on the job.
a.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I've been very concerned about the water I'm drinking. I know that bottled spring water is also contaminated by weird chemicals, but I feel like it is much better than municipal water. So, I've been searching for a better source of water.
So far I've been able to find reverse osmosis and distillation products online. It seems like distillation is better. I've found a product that claims to distill the water twice. What if I were to put a good reverse osmosis filter and a double distiller in series (costing about $1500)... anyone know how effective that would be?
I used to work for an engineering company that did a lot of work with "hazardous waste remediation". I was the computer guy, but the lab manager was a long-time friend of mine. He had a couple of interesting things to say about the business:
(1) Now that we are reliably detecting much lower amounts of contaminants, people are demanding that we get rid of them even though they are insignificant. It's an emotional rather than a rational thing.
Institutions that make their livelihood in this area -- particularly government bureaucracies like the EPA -- are very, very highly motivated to make these small things seem like real problems, because that is how they increase their power and budget.
There was a fairly conclusive study taken in Canada where the levels of a lake were maintained at a few parts per trillion of the chemicals in birth control to simulate the effects of urinating birth control. The effects were remarkable.
While there were no effects of the synthetic estrogen on tadpole growth, development and sex ratios, we did see a low incidence of males with eggs in the treated lake. After estrogen additions, one of the more predominant species of zooplankton had lower proportions of males, and females from several species of zooplankton produced fewer eggs.
The entire study is here: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/sr-sr/finance/tsri-irst/proj/endocrin/tsri-94_e.html
This is my sig.
1. Bottle tap water
2. Claim water is a homeopathic remedy for just about everything.
3. Profit!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quote: "Perhaps. What you're talking about is a single exposure of a single contaminant to a perfectly spherical and healthy adult male existing in a vacuum with no other contaminants or genetic predispositions to illness of any kind."
True enough. But that is part of the point. First off, I should point out that there is no absence of studies! Effective and toxic levels of most of these substances have been long-established. There are still some gaps in long-term-exposure data for some substances, but even those gaps have been closing because people started worrying about this stuff 30 and 40 years ago, and there have been LOTS of long-term studies.
Given that, we need to concentrate on the real, known problems (like hormones and antibiotics in meat) rather than things that make great emotional arguments, but that we know scientifically are not real problems, or at least have extremely small probabilities of being problems.
Further, excess human female hormones in the environment (which beef growth hormones closely mimic, for one example) are likely to hurt male children (and even male adults) as much as female children. Why are people not paying as much attention to that?
Many countries will not even allow the importation of U.S. beef because of the antibiotics and hormones. I do not know about exporting chicken, but they use similar practices in that industry.
The meat industry can get at least as much meat (perhaps even more) without hormones, by using high-yield breeds like the Belgian Blue. But since the industry has not seemed inclined to change their practices on their own, it looks like we might have to force them, via legislation or litigation, or even boycotting if necessary.
I am appalled to hear about these attacks on the purity of our precious bodily fluids!
I knew it! Anyone has seen The Presence?
I guarantee that I could make an appointment tomorrow and probably walk out of the Drs office with some sort of happy pill or sleep med. Yet i consider myself a perfectly happy and functioning person.
Well, you might, except that your insurance company might say hey, you are a perfectly healthy and happy person, and deny you coverage!
This is my sig.
.. but not mine, which comes out of my own private well far from any potential sources of pollution, filtered and cleaned by 70' of bedrock. Best tasting water you can find anywhere, and much healthier too.
Coca-cola is bottled locally pretty much everywhere it's consumed.
It is, after all, much easier to ship syrup than finished soda.
All Coca-cola and Dasani is just local water, filtered and with additives (there's a mineral packet for making Dasani). The other major soft drink brands work the same way.
Of course, this it OT, but this is as good a time as any to quote why we must protect them. Courtesy of Dr. Strangelove.
Ripper: Mandrake?
Mandrake: Yes, Jack?
Ripper: Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?
Mandrake: Well, I can't say I have.
Ripper: Vodka, that's what they drink, isn't it? Never water?
Mandrake: Well, I-I believe that's what they drink, Jack, yes.
Ripper: On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason.
Mandrake: Oh, eh, yes. I, uhm, can't quite see what you're getting at, Jack.
Ripper: Water, that's what I'm getting at, water. Mandrake, water is the source of all life. Seven-tenths of this earth's surface is water. Why, do you realize that seventy percent of you is water?
Mandrake: Uh, uh, Good Lord!
Ripper: And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids.
Mandrake: Yes. (he begins to chuckle nervously)
Ripper: Are you beginning to understand?
Mandrake: Yes. (more laughter)
Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure-grain alcohol?
Mandrake: Well, it did occur to me, Jack, yes.
Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Uh? Yes, I-I have heard of that, Jack, yes. Yes.
Ripper: Well, do you know what it is?
Mandrake: No, no I don't know what it is, no.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
CowboyNeal fell in the creek again.
Have gnu, will travel.
In Soviet Russia, toilets pee in you!
Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Some effects:
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
see http://www.dhmo.org/
Give me a break! If I were to make a list of things in our water that one might choose to worry about, this would be at the very, very bottom?
You really have to be desperate for something to worry about to get concerned about compounds that have already been extensively tested in human populations at astronomically higher doses and shown to be at least reasonably safe. Waving your hands about and talking about "long term" exposure does not make them any more scary. Almost all drug effects have thresholds--which is to say a concentration below which they do nothing
It is hard to get effects at very low concentrations. Basically, to do anything to the body, a drug has to stick to something in the body for long enough to somehow damage it. To do so at low concentrations requires a lot of binding energy. Compounds with enough binding energy to produce effects at such low doses are very, very rare. The only real exception is mutagens--drugs that bind to DNA and damage it. In this case, there is at least a real, if tiny, chance that one molecule of the drug could hurt something in your body. But drugs that are able to do this at very low levels do it even more at high doses, producing damaging effects that lead to them being weeded out early in drug development.
So if you insist on worrying about something, worry about all of those industrial chemicals in the water, because you can be sure that any molecule that is made or used for any purpose is in your water at some level. Most of those haven't been tested in big clinical trials at much higher doses in human populations. The chance that those molecules will hurt you is probably pretty small, also, but it's not quite as ridiculous as worrying about traces of pharmaceuticals.
With the cost of my drug coverage going up every year, and the co-pay going up, too, I thought I'd never be able to afford prescription drugs! Now all I need to do is drink a few hundred thousand gallons of water!
"(To be a useful environmentalist, you have to also be a rational one, and focus attention on issues which actually have a significant and non-zero impact.)"
So, hermaphrodite fish isn't a serious issue and is a non-zero impact?
the thing is we're cranking out all kinds of drugs that contain female hormones etc and they're very stable, even in aquifers, and the thing is aquatic animals use the same hormones, and they have the same gender determining effects.... so a fish, born male, in stream with a lot of estrogen grows an egg sack, and you're saying we don't need to think about the 'minute' quantities that we're pumping out? oral contraceptives and menopausal treatments are all notorious for pumping out high levels of estrogen, not to mention 'hormone replacement therapy' which uses the most of these compounds. and unlike other compounds, the liver and other organs don't dispose of estrogen. the cells readily accept it making it perhaps the most problematic chemical. at least if you want to live in a world where there are still male fish in the rivers.
I call FUD.
Let's remember that our ancestors for millions of years have been drinking water with all sorts of NATURAL pollutants, of varying lethality: mud, feces, ungodly numbers of organisms, any soluble mineral that stream or pond happened to contact, etc, etc, etc.
Umpteen thousands of generations later, while not perfect, I daresay that the resulting human (or any animal in 2008) digestive tract and immune system is pretty freaking robust and capable of isolating/filtering/rejecting pollutants and contaminants. Despite these pollutants being in our water systems for probably the last 50 years, people are living longer than ever. QED?
Evolution for the win.
Granted, of COURSE there are pollutants now (such as microtraces of drugs, etc) that we've never encountered before. But I'm pretty confident that my system will handle it.
Either that, or kill me. If I handle it and pass those genes onto offspring, it's a win for the species.
From the moment we stumbled upon the idea of fire, humans have accepted the tradeoffs of technology. We began to cook our food - with a resulting increase of some sort of carcinogen, if my weird vegan hippie friends are right - but what we got was a massive reduction in food poisoning, bacteriological issues, and parasites with eating uncooked meat. The tradeoff was worth it, IMO. We now have electricity, but there are countless effects on the environment and us due to the generation of same....aside from my hippie friends, nobody's advocating banning electricity.
Considering the general life-improvements most of those drugs have given the human species overall, I think the tradeoff has been worth it.
-Styopa
A silly response to a chicken little story
No cocktail of government issued drugs or ridiculous waters bill in sight!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Musings aside...I'd like to think that some work goes into filtering the water supply between the toilet and tap. At least enough that I'm only imbibing the product of some opium addict on the other side of the planet. (I like to keep those things impersonal.)
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
And to clear things up, I'd like to point out that I know it wouldn't be a germline mutation.
Also, I'd like to add that such a thing would be a boon to the fishing industry.
(Bad form to self-reply, I know.)
Damn you corporates!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I agree with the assertion that Bottled water is a fraud. $4 for a bottle of tap water is sheer fantasy marketing. On the other hand I do buy bottled water at one of those stands that filter it on the spot.
For 40 cents a gallon.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because our drinking water comes straight from the Rocky Mountains, we inhabitants of Boulder, Colorado will remain unchanged while the lot of you mutate into hideous freaks. Ironically, this will make Boulderites the most normal people on the planet.
I weep for the future.
Great times, even if just to watch the first ever water sommelier in action.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
exposure of all the different types of drugs to be found in the water is worrying long term chronic exposure to all the different types of drugs make it impossible to think this does not effect peoples health.
I Predict A Riot
Found it here
Many people, I've noticed, seem to ignore the whole enforced fluoridation issue by telling silly jokes in the nudge, point and giggle method of spin control tried and tested in junior high schools everywhere. It would be easy to comment on the sort of folks who are controlled in this manner, but there's a fish in a barrel quality to that which feels sort of mean.
-FL
If you're a municipal water supplier, just add an option for special "extra pure" tap water to people's water bills, $20 per month or something. It's all in their heads anyway so why should Coca Cola get the profits instead of you?
No sig today...
Tell that to anyone in a 3rd world country... You know, the ones where 10 million people died this week due to drinking contaminated water.
False logic. The fact that this one issue is not overriding ALL the other health and medical improvements in the past several years, does not guarantee that it isn't killing a large number of people (not that I believe it is).
Evolution doesn't solve death. Evolution only guarantees organisms that will live long enough to reproduce. Let me know when you evolve resistance to being poked with pointy sticks...
Somehow, I missed the part of the article where anyone advocated banning pharmaceuticals.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Drugs, drugs everywhere! Everybody panic! And don't forget to pick up a 24 pack of bottled water while doing so!
...you can't fight here. This is the war room!
The mutants who have adapted to digesting cow's milk can exist in some pretty sparse environments. Looks like an advantage, IMO.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I doubt that you know this does not present any selection pressure on the pathogenic bacteria in your body. When my brother tested atropine for the military, he got paid. (My friend Gene died.) When do I get my check?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
And most banknotes have traces of cocaine on them. Is this a real medical issue or only something to scare the homeopaths with?
This is why I only drink rainwater and grain alcohol!
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
...Wait, who thought "women's liberation" (what's with the outdated terminology?) constituted dressing eight year olds in hotpants? Are you seriously claiming this practice is the result of feminism, and if so, can you tell me what the hell they're putting in the drinking water over there in Melbourne? Clearly you guys get better drugs than we do here in California.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Surely all the benzos in the water will help with that?
Philip K. Dick knew what the drugs in water were for!
"I think this line is mostly filler"
The Biscane aquifer in South Fl. is fed mostly by rain water, NOT from recycled waste discharge.
Most of the waste water in SF is ocean dumped. So most private wells, and those run by cities here are probably less contaminated that the water sources in the northern states.
Frightening though!
"If you don't see the problem there, please go read Silent Spring, right now. Or go read about how PCBs made their way from Springfield, MA to the other side of the planet. Now think about how we tell pregnant women not to eat too much tuna, lest they get a dangerous dosage of mercury that could harm their child. Wake up, man."
Fuck off alarmist.
You'll forgive me if when I see over the top hyperbolic alarmism like yours I completely reject it and the morons who use it to further their agenda.
"Well, you might, except that your insurance company might say hey, you are a perfectly healthy and happy person, and deny you coverage!"
So the doctor prescribes you medication, but the insurance company overrides the docs diagnosis and denies coverage?
Do you have any idea why your stupid attempt at a joke is moronic? Do you even understand why your post marks yo as a fucking ignoramus?
Fuck off moron.
like, I get mine in liters. kewl.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Further, excess human female hormones in the environment (which beef growth hormones closely mimic, for one example) are likely to hurt male children (and even male adults) as much as female children. Why are people not paying as much attention to that? "
Maybe it's because some people see the short term changes caused by the feminization of males as a postive thing (Disclaimer: I am not one of these people).
1. Schools force Johnny and Jane to take drug test.
2. Nurse gives them drug-laden water to help tem pee.
3. Johnny and Jane pee into specimen cup.
4. Drug tests come back positive.
5. Johnny and Jane suspended.
6. Suspended students take pressure off budget and scholastic demands for administration.
7. Profit!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
How come there isnt any heroin or oxycontin in the water. Then I would never get dehydrated. Drink water, feel groooovy!
Someone should tag this "brandnewworld"
he OP's example of milk and being sick is only a correlative relationship because he lacks any true mechanistic explanation for his observation and furthermore fails to demonstrate that the two things are not merely coincidental in nature.
Well, here's the thing. "Causitive explanation" is something that you are misapplying. When you say, "caustive explanation", what you really say, do you have a model to describe it?
In other words, here's where global warming skeptics always fail. They say, "oh, it can't be this or that model of GCM", but, yet, they don't have a model of their own... so any criticism they have has to be suspicious. I mean, if I say, I think GW is caused by the Sun, then I had need to have a model of my own to back that up. Of course, a skeptic was "right", then, the AGW people would have to go to the drawing board as we throw snowballs at Al Gore. However, in the normal course of events, its the build up of a model that is the useful work product of science. If you say CO2, and I say sunspots, then both of should be able to answer, what happens with 5 sunspots of this area versus CO2 of 1000ppm. (gosh 1/1000 CO2 is pretty scary eh?)
The model ultimately describes how to build a tool to manipulate something. So, the idea of a model is to be able to describe a range of events based on a smaller set of experiments, its an encoding of knowledge, such that, other people can look at that, and within the valid range of the model, expect to get the same results from the same set of experiments, consistent with what the model predicts. In the case of global warming, we are learning, what can we manipulate to change climate? In the case of our milk drinking buddy, we have to ask, well what do we need to learn, and that's where you misapply the level of detail needed for a model.
In the case of our milk drinking OP, the real question is, does drinking milk make you sick. The answer is, yes, it probably does, and for him, there's no need for a model with the detail you define. It's a simple, yes or no thing and the more he or she test drinks milk, the greater the probability that it was in fact the milk that did it. Given, furthermore, that lactose intolerance is hugely common in humanity, in fact, only some white people are actually lactose tolerant (the rest of the world isn't), the real claim that might demand a model would, why would drinking the milk from another species actually be -safe-!
This is my sig.
East-rogen!
Dear god does Torchwood ever suck.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Minneapolis water was tested, the only drug found was caffeine. Iiiii wwaaanntt too mooovve theerrree.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
this article would have a better effect if it pointed out that there is piss in the drinking water.
No way they are going to let us get free pharmaceuticals in our drinking water.
Anyone have a cost effective solution to getting the drugs out of tap water and back into pills/capsules?
There's an easy way to get everyone working on cleaning all this up. Just announce that tests have found trace amounts of peanuts in the water supply. Guaranteed, every whiner and do-gooder around will get up in arms and demand that water be 100% pure. Because, you know, 1 PPT of peanut could kill someone, somewhere...
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Evolution doesn't solve death. Evolution only guarantees organisms that will live long enough to reproduce. Let me know when you evolve resistance to being poked with pointy sticks..
Well, if you took a population of 1,000 cats, and poked them with pointy sticks, and bred them, and did that for many generations, eventually you'd wind up with a cat that had some sort of a tough shell.
This is my sig.
the Brita filter could remove everything except for the mood stabilizers?
If the trace amounts somehow did effect us (which I doubt), lets say certain trace amount of a combination of drugs effected birth rates in the regions with that combination present (over a very long period of time)....could be a source of subtle evolution? Like another user pointed out, it'd be better to associate the drugs with our bloodstream. We can rule out government based mind-control conspiracy, since slipping anti-dep meds into the watersupply would go against the Nation's terrorist scare domestic policy program. Wait a sec....if that's true...then the terrorists must be the ones slipping the meds in the water so we don't catch onto their plots...now I'm scared, gonna grab some water.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I know you're joking, but just for completeness, the actual effects are of a rather different nature.
Medium cat is MEDIUM.