Pharmaceuticals in Tap Water

Kudos to the Associated Press, who this week published an outstanding series on Big Pharma showing up in the drinking water supplies of 41 million Americans. So far. AP reporters combed the results of over 50 metropolitan water tests. Among the findings:

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. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city's watersheds.

Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco's drinking water.

So what does it all mean for our health? The AP used a sobering kicker:

...some experts say medications may pose a unique danger because, unlike most pollutants, they were crafted to act on the human body.

"These are chemicals that are designed to have very specific effects at very low concentrations. That's what pharmaceuticals do. So when they get out to the environment, it should not be a shock to people that they have effects," says zoologist John Sumpter at Brunel University in London, who has studied trace hormones, heart medicine and other drugs.

And while drugs are tested to be safe for humans, the timeframe is usually over a matter of months, not a lifetime. Pharmaceuticals also can produce side effects and interact with other drugs at normal medical doses. That's why aside from therapeutic doses of fluoride injected into potable water supplies pharmaceuticals are prescribed to people who need them, not delivered to everyone in their drinking water.

The Skinny: We've heard that reverse-osmosis filters, and even relatively inexpensive carbon filters like Brita, do a decent job of filtering some of these compounds out. If you think bottled water is a viable alternative, think again: the plastics that leach into the water from the bottle, not to mention the carbon-footprint of transporting and bottling water, make tap water a better option. Wouldn't it be nice if we kept it clean?