It's Only There if You Look

There have been some cool articles recently on pharmaceuticals in our water. The pharmaceuticals get there by two means 1) we take too much and it is excreted into our sewerage or 2) we just flush unused drugs. Now, it should concern us that there is a clear link between sewerage and our drinking water. I mean if Jane up river from you is taking birth control pills and is excreting the excess drug in her urine why is it showing up in my drinking water and more ominously I only know of the birth control drugs because I looked. What else is there?

In the Chemical and Engineering News article (LINK) I like the statement:

"FOR THREE SUMMERS, Kidd and her colleagues spiked a lake in Canada's Experimental Lakes Area with 17α-ethinylestradiol at a concentration of 5 ppt—a concentration that has been measured in municipal wastewaters and in river waters downstream of discharges. During the autumn that followed the first addition of the estrogenic compound, the researchers observed delayed sperm cell development in male fathead minnows—the freshwater equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. A year later, the male fathead minnows were producing eggs and had largely stopped reproducing. The minnow population began to plummet. The decline continued for an additional three years until the fish had all but disappeared from the lake."

These are the ones that seem to be everywhere in small amounts that you need to think about when you drink your glass of water:

17alpha-Ethinylestradiol (synthetic birth control)
Carbamazepine (anticonvulsant and mood stabilizing drug)
Diclofenac (nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory drug, there is a cool back story on this one concerning the vultures that "clean-up" dead bodies in India)
Fluoxetine (Prozac, antidepressant)

Now, we need to couple alarm with common sense. The concentrations are very low and far below any known toxic effect. But on the other hand, while it is true that the concentrations of birth control drugs are not going to kill fish but it will make the male fish grow eggs. I think I'd rather die. Still I will leave the risk-benefit discussion to the experts:

""The treatment processes we have are highly effective," Snyder concludes. He points out that we're seeing more pharmaceuticals in our environment because we're getting better at detecting them, not necessarily because there are more of them. It's therefore important, he says, to develop toxicologically based limits for pharmaceuticals in our water. "If we ignore concentration and say presence or absence is our litmus test, then there will be no end to that," Snyder says. "Detection does not infer health risk and nondetection does not ensure safety.""