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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
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.
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.
No. This story has been around for awhile and it drives me crazy. We're talking about quantities like 3 parts per trillion on most drugs. It is far far below (many orders of magnitude!) the point at which it would do anything to you, yet so many people seem to nearly panic at the idea of drugs in the water.
I'm just waiting for the study on air to come out.
I read the internet for the articles.
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 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.
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.
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
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.