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Medicines in tap water not as risky as some say
By GORDON DILLOW
Chances are I'm taking a lot of pharmaceutical medications. I may be taking acetaminophen and ibuprofen and Valium and Xanax. I may be taking antihistamines and antibiotics and anti-convulsants and anti-cholesterols. I may be taking the three major male anti-impotence drugs, Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, which should have me rarin' to go – except that I may also be taking female sex hormones, which has me wondering if I'm going to experience an unexpected turn in life and be rarin' to go with other men. In fact, according to recent news reports, I may be taking hundreds of pharmaceuticals that I've never even heard of. And so are you. And all we have to do to take them is drink some water. Now before you spit out your coffee, I should note that the amounts of pharmaceuticals that may be in our drinking water are almost infinitesimally small – so small that they have to be measured in parts-per-trillion, with one part-per-trillion being equal to about one drop of water in 14 million gallons. The fact is, there's probably thousands of times more natural arsenic in your water than there is of any particular pharmaceutical – and even that larger amount of arsenic isn't nearly enough to kill you or make you sick or even put a damper on your day. Nevertheless, pharmaceuticals in drinking water is the latest environmental bugaboo in the headlines. And unless you read the fine print, it almost makes you want to take a Xanax before you turn on the tap. The problem is that in Orange County and throughout Southern California, much of the water we use is recycled – which is a nice way of saying that it's former sewage water that has been treated to meet strict federal standards and is then pumped into rivers and streams, where it seeps down into underground aquifers, in the process undergoing even greater natural cleansing. From there it's pumped back up again and put into municipal water systems. It's probably some of the cleanest water in the history of the world. But because some of it was once urban sewage, it's bound to contain trace elements of drugs that people naturally excreted and flushed down toilets. In the past, nobody would even have known about it because the technology for finding such tiny traces didn't exist. But now, when the guys in the white lab coats can analyze water down to the parts-per-trillion level or even smaller, there's almost nothing they can't find some trace of, including pharmaceuticals. Then the question becomes, is it dangerous? The cooler heads in the water biz say no. "You're going to get hit by a bus long before you're going to have a negative health risk from pharmaceuticals in the water," says Virginia Grebbien, general manager of the Orange County Water District. She noted that scientists say that at the current pharmaceutical levels a person would have to drink the water for centuries before cumulatively ingesting the equivalent of one pill. True, there's somewhat more concern about pharmaceuticals exposure to fish and other aquatic life that live in water mixed with raw or treated sewage. For example, last year researchers said they found instances of "feminized" male fish among the scaly bottom-feeders dining out near the treated sewage outfall pipe off Huntington Beach – although whether the feminization was actually caused by estrogen-like substances in the treated sewage water hasn't been determined. Nevertheless, on the theory that the fewer foreign substances in the water the better – and perhaps to help assuage the doomsayers – next month Orange County water officials will start asking pharmacies to advise their customers not to flush unused pharmaceuticals down the toilet. Instead, they should securely wrap them up and throw them in the trash. Meanwhile, despite the headlines, we really shouldn't worry about pharmaceuticals in our water. I know I won't. Because I just had a nice, cool glass of water. And suddenly I feel relaxed, serene, detached from the ordinary cares and worries of the day. Copyright 2005 The Orange County Register | Privacy policy | User agreement

Source: http://www.bigbearwatersolutions.org/pdf_files/OCRegister.article.020106.pdf