Are There Meds in Your Families Drinking Water?

This article by Diana Schoberg which appeared in the August 2012 issue of Rotarian Magazine talks about the very real concern about PPCP’s or Prescription and Personal Card Products affecting our drinking water.  So what is your best bet in making sure you don’t ingest PPCP’s from your water?  Reverse osmosis drinking water systems do a great job of removing them from your water!

In Philadelphia, 56 pharmaceuticals were detected in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness, and heart problems.   Tests found that a portion of the drinking water supplied to 18.5 million people in Southern California contained anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medicines.   San Francisco”s drinking water had a sex hormone.   An analgesic and antipyretic were found in Berlin”s drinking water, and antibiotics, anti-epileptics, and beta blockers have been found in the Netherlands”.   The amount of pharmaceuticals and personal care products entering the natural environment each year is about equal to that of pesticides.   In Germany, consumers flush away 364 tons of pharmaceuticals annually.

 

States in the U.S. Great Lakes region collected 4.5 million pills for safe disposal in one week during the Great Lakes Earth Day Challenge in April 2008.   The human body absorbs as little as 10 percent of a dose of a prescription drug.   More antibiotics are used on livestock in North Carolina than on people in the entire United States.   Water downstream of a Nebraska feedlot had steroid levels four times as high as water upstream, and male fathead minnows living downstream had low testosterone and small heads.   U.S. manufacturers have legally released more than 270 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and personal care products into the nation”s waterways over 20 years, including eight million pounds of skin-bleaching cream, three million pounds of nicotine compounds, and 10,000 pounds of the antibiotic tetracycline hydrochloride.   The antiseptics phenol and hydrogen peroxide account for 92 percent of the total.   U.S. hospitals and nursing homes pitch 250 million pounds of pills and drug-contaminated packaging each year.   Individuals cause 85 to 90 percent of pharmaceutical and personal care product contamination in water.

 

Hormones can accumulate on the scum that covers rocks in streams, a source of food for fish and other aquatic life.   The feminization of fish is associated with exposure to ethinyl estradiol, the active ingredient in birth control pills.   Eighty percent of male smallmouth bass throughout the United States are growing eggs.   When researchers sampled five streams near U.S. wastewater treatment plants, they found an antihistamine in the livers of fish of four of them, and two antidepressants in the livers of fish at all five.   Some scientists have blamed antidepressants for changing sperm levels in marine life.

 

Studies in Japan and Texas, USA, have found lower rates of suicide, homicide, and rape in areas with lithium in the drinking water.   A psychiatrist in Ireland called on the government to add lithium to the public water supply, and a cardiologist in Northern Ireland suggested putting statins in the water to help tackle heart disease.

 

An analysis by the World Health Organization found that trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals were unlikely to cause adverse health effects in humans, and said formal guidelines and special treatments are unnecessary. Diana Schomberg

A home Reverse Osmosis Drinking Water System will remove PPCP’s from your families drinking water.  Shop Goldline 50 Reverse Osmosis System outside of Ontario