Trace Pharmaceuticals in Water Supply Not a Good Reason to Drink Bottled Water
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 03.10.08
There's trace amounts of prescription drugs in the water; and the bike race sponsors want a pee test. Don't panic and drink bottled water. Really. Don't fall for it.
A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.Roughly half the US gets potable water from groundwater sources (wells). Groundwater is largely unaffected by wastewater effluents containing prescription drugs. So, there's a 50% chance that this risk is zero, wherever you live or travel stateside. Obvious exception for trips to China for the Olympics.
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.
Here's the marketing hook. It's true that bottled water is generally sourced from wells ("springs" in marketing talk) and is filtered to remove organics. If you live in the "other half," - the part of the population that relies on treated surface water for drinking - does that mean you should you be buying bottled water to prevent a hazardous exposure? No.
Get a point-of-consumption filter with carbon (pitcher or faucet mounted). It's what water bottlers use; and, it's what public water suppliers may optionally use to remove organic compounds that contribute off-flavors. A personal carbon filter removes the dope at home. Quite effectively.
Thanks a lot AP, for handing a dopey talking point over to the bottled water marketers. For your next act, you can test iPods for the presence of vinyl.
Addendum:: Three key items need to be added in order to fully understand this issue. These have received no coverage in the US print media. Say you saw them here first.
Theoretically, over-use of antibiotics may have selected for "resistant" bacteria in waste streams and downstream receiving waters. Resistant bacteria should be able to biodegrade antibiotics. This is not addressed specifically by the study, as reported thus far.
Metro areas around Chicago, IL, Waukegan, IL., Milwaukee, WI or Kenosha/Racine WI, all of which withdraw water from the Great Lakes, would likely not be affected by this issue, either because of the dilution factor, waste water discharging outside the basin, and/or because those cities may already use activated carbon to remove off-tastes. Media reports thus far seen do not address whether the study attempted to exclude for or account for these factors. But, just as with the groundwater vs surface water distinction cited above, another large segment of the US can reasonably be excluded from the issue. What's left is this.
Many municipal wastewater treatment plants discharging to rivers are not performing up to standards in the US - many bypass untreated wastewater and storm water regularly- because of the refusal of the Federal government for a number of years to enforce permit standards and include sufficient construction grant program funding in the budget to see them met.
There's really no point in doing elegant studies of treatment efficiencies on these dilute substances unless this more basic issue is first solved. It is unbelievable that this has not even been reported upon, thus far.
Via::Associated Press, "AP probe finds drugs in drinking water" Image credit::City of Hamilton, Ontario Canada– Department of Public Works, Bike Race
John -- I agree with you re not using this to justify bottled water. But this is a legit report. Pharma in waterways, even at very low concentrations, has already shown that it can do dramatic harm to wildlife. And what's in the waterways will eventually wind up in groundwater as well. (Half the West already has perchlorate -- e.g. rocket fuel -- in its groundwater.)
OnEarth Magazine broke this story back in 2006; writer Elizabeth Royte can explain it much better than me. Read the story, or check out the podcast
I'd go so far as to say that nearly 100% of people in the USA have a LARGE dosage of a powerful antibiotic and antiviral in their water. It's chlorine. I strongly recommend filtering it out, and if you are somewhere where you can't filter it out, go ahead and buy bottled.
The AP story claims that home filtration systems do not remove the drugs from our drinking water. I completely agree that this is no reason to switch to bottled...I'm sure the bottled water contains the same contaminants...but is there really a way to filter this stuff out?
=== authors' response follows ===
There are several technologies available for home water filtration. Reverse osmosis, carbon canister, ion exchange, pressure membrane, etc.
I would not take Associated Press as an authority on water treatment effectiveness. (SInce when did AP start acting like Greenpeace to chase headlines?) For that matter, I would not take TreeHugger as a final authority on wastewater treatment technology effectiveness either!
The fact remains that activated carbon filtration is widely used in the drinking water treatment, food processing, and water bottling industries to remove dissolved organics. In general, the longer the organic molecule, and the polar the molecule, the more likely it is to be effectively removed by an well performing carbon filter. Key point is that if bottled water companies use carbon filters, there's no exposure gain to be had by switching to bottled, if indeed AP happened to be correct in their assertion (which I highly doubt).
The technical problems I have with this story are that: there is no link back to a website with detailed study design description; there is no reference to chain of custody protocols used, if any; we don't know whether the lab used for the tests was EPA certified and if it followed GLP guidelines; and we also don't know whether blind samples were send to another lab to verify results; and so on.
We are not even told what the testing detection limits are vs precision limits at the low concentrations reported. The upshot is that we should all regard this as an amateur effort, likely done scatter gun fashion, without sufficient peer review. A more useful study design- one that sounds less like a headline grabber - would have differentiated water systems with intakes exposed to bypassing upstream treatment works from systems that were not vulnerable to that issue.
The fact that we are in an election year, with various interests vying for public attention with scare stories, should give us due caution. It may well cost unbudgeted billions to upgrade existing city WWTPs just to avoid wet weather bypassing. It might cost millions to determine optimum treatment protocols if the risk to downstream cities is demonstrably high enough. Because that last item might take many years to resolve, politically, it makes sense to get on top of the bypassing problems first and then see if we still need added treatment levels in certain watersheds, upstream from major metro water intakes.
Conversely, the argument can be made that it is more cost effective to just treat Minneapolis wastewater to protect downstream St.Louis, and require less treatment of St Louis, for example. You can see how political this becomes with effluent crossing state boundaries.
Plus, bottled water is unregulated (ie, less regulated than tap water) and it leaches antimony.
==== author's response follows ===
Right you are!
At the end of the day, it may turn out that there is a Gaia feedback loop in place, such that cities with the greenest public spaces and incentives turn out to have the least contaminated public water. (joking a bit here)
Thank you so much for explaining this so clearly!
Here are details how reverse osmosis works and how effective it is at purifying contaminants.
Reverse osmosis is the opposite of the osmosis process that occurs in nature. Osmosis is the passage of a liquid through a semi-permeable membrane. In nature, osmosis drives a liquid with a low level of dissolved solids (usually water) through a semi-permeable membrane into a solution of higher dissolved solids concentration. It continues until the osmotic pressures of both liquids have equalized. This natural process tends to mix the concentrations of the solutions on both sides of the membrane. The natural osmosis process, therefore, works great in pushing the more concentrated tree sap up to the tallest leaves of an oak tree, but it uses up pure water to do it.
To treat water using the osmotic process, the natural forces of osmosis must be reversed. In the reverse osmosis process, the water from a liquid with a high concentration of dissolved solids is forced to flow through the membrane to the low concentration side where this water can be collected. The process is achieved by applying enough pressure to overcome the natural osmotic pressure forces on a membrane. The semi-permeable membranes used in the process are engineered to only allow the passage of the water molecule. The result is high quality water.
The heart of the RO system is the semi-permeable membrane which acts as a molecular filter to remove up to 99% of all dissolved solids.* The semi-permeable membrane allows water molecules to pass through while blocking larger molecules. So as pressure is applied to the concentrated solution, water is forced through the membrane from the concentrated side to the dilute side. The dissolved and particular materials are left behind.
Water molecules penetrate the thin layer of the membrane and diffuse through it molecule by molecule. Dissolved ions heavier than water do not diffuse through this layer because the solubility of the ions is much less than that of the water. Thus, the water moves through more readily and separation from the other molecules present occurs. This process removes up to 99% of most dissolved mineral salts, virtually all of the particulate matter, and many dissolved organic compounds.
*Not all substances removed or reduced by reverse osmosis are necessarily in your water. RO systems should not be used with water that is microbiologically unsafe or of unknown quality without adequate disinfection before or after the system.