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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."
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
lol, think a bit.
Hints:
1- It not put directly into the drinking water
2- It involves toilets
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.
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?
Just think of the consequences if homeopathy actually worked.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Me too. I'd also be interested to know whether these quantities, even if they're far below therapeutic doses, could make drugs less effective when people take them. For example, are antibiotics getting into the water and, if so, might we start to develop immunity even if we've never taken them directly?
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
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.
That must be some pretty prime real-estate if you're asking $43,560 per acre.
I'm happy you found drugs that work for you. I'm unhappy that you could care less about either the topic at hand or that your drugs are ending up in my drinking water.
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...
...better water management practices.
That would include not contaminating it in the first place so that maybe we wouldn't need all those fancy, expensive filters.
What?
considering that one part per trillion means that in an 8-ounce glass, you get one frickin' molecule, I really doubt that this is presenting any kind of selection pressure on the symbiotic bacteria in your body.
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.
In short, since I stopped drinking milk, I stopped getting sick.
Even assuming you're telling the truth, "Correlation is not Causation".
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're probably correct about the miniscule antibiotic resistance building trends of miniscule amounts of antibiotics in the water and definitely correct not to worry about addictions to pain killers.
But that logic doesn't hold for the hormones or hormone-mimicking properties of substances found in the water. Some hormones routinely affect biological processes at concentrations measured in parts per billion. This is especially true in developing organisms, where, e.g., gradients of such miniscule concentrations can determine which end of an embryo is the head and which is the tail.
The truth is we don't know the effect that these artificial chemicals will have on us or on the environment.
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.
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
The difference, if you're interested, (though your factious tone suggests that you are not) is that atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures have a known causal relationship via the undisputed greenhouse effect. This relationship must exist in some form or another, because if it didn't, life as we know it would not be possible as the earth's average surface temperature would be well below freezing.
The 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.
Science. It works, bitches.
-Grym
Maybe the dumbass should have brushed his teeth and not ate sweet crap before bed time. Fluoride strengthens teeth when used in a topical application.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Anyone from 100 years ago would consider our society unbearably sexually depraved,
No, that's just factually wrong. It depends very much on *who* from 100 years ago. From which culture, and which aspects of "our" culture. (I suppose you're talking American culture, it's not the same even across first-world countries, not even close)
For example, you people manage to debate for WEEKS and write THOUSANDS of webpages, newspaper-articles, BLOG-entries and whatnot on the topic of showing a single naked female breast on TV for perhaps 5 seconds. Which is just ridicolously prude.
You also have, if I got it correctly, 18 as age of consent in many jurisdictions, an age where many people a hundred years ago would expect to be married already and certainly sexually active.
In general there's a large moral panic in the USA about children and sexuality. Elder Scrolls was rated 13+, a game where you run around and kill beasts and humans, blood squirting. Then it gor re-rated "mature" 17+ because someone made a mod that made female characters run around topless.
I could give more examples like these, but there's no point, I'm sure you can think of them yourself.
...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
I think you're being overly negative here. The food distribution system here in the United States isn't perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you suggest. Things like preservatives and pasteurization don't make store-bought foods more profitable; they make it possible. Without these things, food would spoil far too quickly and regional famine would occur. Modern urban life would become impossible as there simply isn't enough nearby arable land to support the millions of city-dwellers.
As far as the FDA corruption goes, I think you might make such arguments in the case of pharmaceuticals but, in my opinion as someone who has studied the matter in a college course, they do a pretty bang-up job with our food, for the most part. You know, for a country with 300 million people and an historically unprecedented amount of choice in food products, it's rather amazing that food-borne illnesses and outbreaks are so relatively rare. In fact, by most standards the United States has the most secure, safest food supply in the world.
-Grym