Drugs In Our Drinking Water 483
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."
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Answer (Score:5, Informative)
Also informing people that what goes down the toilet goes in your drinking water.
Re:Tap Water vs Bottled Water (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure it doesn't supply all of the water Coca-Cola uses for Dasani, but it goes to show what a ripoff bottled water can be, and usually is.
Distillation works (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
You do not develop an immunity to antibiotics. Bacteria do. Whether or not you personally get a mini-dose of antibiotics has not bearing on that.
On the other hand, if we are all getting a mini-dose, then those bacteria that are antibiotic resistant will proser all the more. Also consider that it isn't only humans that would be getting these mini-doses.
Yet another example of the "no man is an island" truism.
Fear mongering at its finest.... (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Same thing in France (Score:-1, Informative)
As a funny detail, in some rivers, all fish showed female features (whatever their real gender was) due to the hormones coming from the sewages.
Here's an article (in french) on the subject : http://www.acme-eau.org/Le-medicament,-du-malade-a-l-eau-potable_a1040.html [acme-eau.org]
It's not so good but I'm too lazy to find another one (I doubt many of you understand french anyway, and google translate is just, well...)
I guess the problem must be exactly the same in every big city.
Old News (Score:2, Informative)
This has been a health concern for a while, especially with the possibility of drug interactions.
Re:Tap Water vs Bottled Water (Score:5, Informative)
Needless to say it's not available here any more.
If you can't be arsed to read the article it's basically:
1. buy clean, uncontaminated tap water @0.06p litre
2. add carcinogen
3. sell for £1.80 litre
4. profit!!!!
5. get found out, "voluntarily" withdraw product
Re:It's the commies (Score:4, Informative)
From Dr. Strangelove. Whoever modded down parent wants slapping.
Re:Tap Water vs Bottled Water (Score:2, Informative)
Well, I wouldn't worry yet (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:LSD (Score:5, Informative)
The mildly amusing flaw in that old tale is that LSD is actually quite unstable, and if you put it in the drinking water it would break down long before it got anywhere near anybody's houses. It has to be carefully stored if you want to keep it for more than an hour or so.
Also, the dose required for LSD to function is so minute compared to most drugs that it would be quite obvious if it was there. Even in small numbers of parts per million, you'd likely be tripping.
It's really quite a strange chemical.
Believe it, kids. (Score:-1, Informative)
Birth Control Should be Banned? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [hc-sc.gc.ca]
Yes, BUT... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
It's all local (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Are you fucking kidding me?! (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, if you assume that the chemical in question has approximately the same molar mass as water, that means that 1 part per billion represents 1.8*10^-8 grams per mole of water, which is about 1 milligram per 55 million kilograms(liters) of water. A chemical that is 10 times heavier per mole than water, present at 100 parts per million represents 1 milligram per 55 liters of water. So in a very bad scenario, 3 liters of water might contain 1/2 milligram of drug, but that's at levels millions of times higher than the article is reporting.
Throw in the that filtering costs almost certainly go up faster than the resulting purity and it isn't all that surprising that municipalities(and state level environmental agencies, and the EPA) aren't doing more.
The other side of it is harder, because any estimates about how much of drug X the average person consumes are going to be hand waving, and then the fraction that ends up in the sewer is even more hand waving. The less of it that is there to begin with, the harder it is to filter.
If you are really worried about it, there are home reverse osmosis systems, they are much more effective than carbon filters.
Re:Perspective (Score:1, Informative)
It's not only these chemicals in commercial milk that cause health issues, but also the fact that it is pasteurized and homogenized. Milk as it comes out of the cow contains enzymes that help make it digestible. These are destroyed by the high heat of pasteurization. That's why so many are allergic to milk products. They cannot digest them without the normally included enzymes.
The cream in the milk, as it comes from the cow, separates out on top. To prevent this, the milk is homogenized. This process breaks the fat particles up into very tiny globules, that remain suspended in the body of the milk. Unfortunately, they are then also small enough to pass undigested through the intestinal wall, directly into the blood stream. These free floating fats, help to clog arteries, leading to heart disease.
Cats fed only store bought, processed milk do not thrive and have reproductive difficulties within two or fewer generations. You can read about a summary of this here.
http://therawfoodsite.com/cats.htm [therawfoodsite.com]
For more on this Google for "Pottenger".
So much of the food sold today is processed by somehow by being "ized", as in pasteurized, hydrolyzed; "ated" as in hydrogenated. Fats are produced or extruded with extreme unnatural heat and pressure. Minerals and other components nature put in the original source are refined out of sugar plants by heat and high pressure. Cheaply manufactured substitutes made from corn are the main ingredient in soft drinks and other food products. The white flour baked goods no longer contain the nutrients formerly present in the grains. All sorts of additives and preservatives are found in the commonly available foods.
The reason for this of course is simple: The profits for the owners of the food factories. Natural, unadulterated foods spoil more quickly on the shelf and in the dairy case. That leads directly to lower profits for the makers and middle men in the food distribution system.
Food producers have not the slightest interest in our health, unless it directly affects their profits. Since the FDA gets much of their funding from these sources, they too don't have much real interest in protecting your health.
In the end, you will NOW spend your money either on more expensive, wholesome, organic foods, or you will spend it LATER on medical costs. I'd say the old adage: "An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure" applies. You have found part of the solution.
We are lucky, living in the country, in that we are able to buy milk from a neighboring small farmer. We get this fresh, just as it comes from the cows. A good rule of thumb for buying stuff at the grocery store: Look for the shortest ingredient list. Look for natural ingredients such as whole wheat, butter, virgin pressed olive oil among others. Avoid manufactured oils, such as soy, canola and other vegetable fats that have been subjected to high heat and/or pressure.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Try again. Avogadro's number [wikipedia.org] is 6.022 E 23. A drug like penicillin has a molecular weight of 334. Other drugs will be heavier or lighter, but generally within a factor of 10. 8oz of water is 236g. That combines to give about 400 billion (4 E 11) molecules of penicillin at 1 part per trillion (1 E -12).
Molecules are small. Even mildly complex organic ones like drugs. Check your intro chem text before spouting off about such things.
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Informative)
Have you heard how girls are reaching menarche at a younger age than a few decades ago and male sperm counts are dropping? "Better" growing up through chemistry.
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
That's why so many are allergic to milk products. They cannot digest them without the normally included enzymes.
Cats fed only store bought, processed milk do not thrive and have reproductive difficulties within two or fewer generations. You can read about a summary of this here.
These two items are related, but not in the way you're implying; humans that have lactose intolerance, along with all cats, simply lack the mutation that allows them to produce lactase beyond the period of normal weaning. That is to say, milk-drinking humans are mutants who have managed to adapt to nursing from some other animal's teat for their entire lives. The presence or absence of milk enzymes is not going to be enough to compensate for a complete lack of an enzyme in a person's gut. It might make a small difference in marginal cases, such as biracial black/white children.
Your link to the cat study is also useless in supporting your point, because the doctor was already feeding the cats raw milk. The difference was between the cooked and uncooked meat scraps, as far as I can tell. Possibly a taurine deficiency. It also fails to mention whether the cats in the experimental groups were fed raw or cooked meat scraps, which would be important in determining the root cause.
Re:Mood stabilizers? (Score:4, Informative)
1:1,000,000,000
Whereas Homeopathic dilutions are often 10-100 serial dilutions at 1:100,
or
1:100,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1:(googol)^2
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But then.... (Score:3, Informative)
This has been heavily and thoroughly studied since the 50's. Fluoride in drinking water helps strengthen teeth. Period.
My dental hygienist formerly worked in a town where no fluoride was added to the water and she said the teeth there were awful. Anecdotes aside:
Re:Mood stabilizers? (Score:3, Informative)
However, the concentrations that we are speaking about here are still detectable, thus higher.
Re:But then.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But then.... (Score:2, Informative)