What Drugs Are in Our Drinking Water?

Finding pharmaceuticals in public water supplies is not a new phenomenon. Low levels of pharmaceuticals in the water supply have been a concern for a decade or longer and are been studied extensively.

Pharmaceuticals get into the water supply in two basic ways:

1. Human excretion: 
   • When a drug is ingested, it is metabolized, and a portion of the original parent drug that does not get metabolized eventually is excreted along with metabolites, which may have biological activity of their own.
2. Drugs are being flushed down the toilet:
   • The amount of drugs that our bodies break down varies widely from drug to drug and even from person to person. For many drugs, about 90 percent of the drug is metabolized, whereas others may not be metabolized as much, and a lot of the parent compound is excreted.
   • Digested drugs are either removed from the body as waste or sweat, and these undigested drugs and metabolites are either flushed down toilets or go down the drain in our showers.
   • Even wastewater treatment plants cannot take care of the situation, as pharmaceuticals pass through water treatment.

Many scientists think that the main way the vast majority of pharmaceuticals get into wastewater is through disposal.

• For many years, unwanted medications are flushed down the toilet, and many people still do that despite updated federal guidelines that now advise people to either take unused drugs to a collection site or mix them with kitty litter or coffee grounds and put them in the trash (the only exception to this are narcotic pain relievers and other hazardous substances).
• However, even with these guidelines, plenty of medications still end up in sewers, and wastewater treatment plants, and, to some degree, back our water supplies.

Although drug levels are low, reportedly measured in parts per billion or trillion and utility companies contend the water is safe, experts from the government say they are not sure whether the levels of drugs in drinking water are low enough to discount harmful health effects in human beings or aquatic animals.

The current treatment process for wastewater includes a combination of coagulation, sedimentation, and filtration and has no mechanism that rids it of pharmaceutical byproducts.

Despite the efficacy of treatment plants, it is a need to account for the fact that drinking water all the time is inevitable, and extra care is needed in sensitive stages of life when it is best to minimize exposure, such as the elderly, the very young, and pregnant women.

Scientists have been trying to address whether pharmaceuticals in water pose a threat to human health in terms of the potential risk for the past 15 to 20 years.

Although it is an area of concern, at this point, there is no confirmed evidence of a health effect except for synthetic hormones, which are a major concern, because hormones work at very low concentrations in the human body.

According to the Public Broadcasting Service, most of these drugs show up in concentrations of less than 10 nanograms per liter, which is insignificant to cause any health hazard.

The World Health Organization found that existing municipal wastewater treatment methods, even the most advanced ones—ozonation, photolysis, and ultrasound—only remove between 20 and 60 percent of pharmaceutical byproducts.

Boiling will not solve the problem, and not even drinking bottled water can be a way to escape the low levels of drugs found in some public water supplies.

Home-filtering systems such as reverse osmosis and activated charcoal system may reduce the pharmaceutical drug levels but cannot remove the entire content.

According to the National Association of Clean Water Agencies and Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, two methods are proven to remove up to 99.99 percent of pharmaceuticals in drinking water:

1. Reverse osmosis
2. Nanofiltration

Four ways to reduce pharmaceutical waste in drinking water include:

1. Limit your purchases: Huge discounts and attractive prices can make big bottles of unused pills create an opportunity for these medications to end up in the water.
2. Do not flush unused medicines: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration advises that all medicines should not be flushed down the drain except for powerful narcotic pain medications because of concerns about accidental overdose or illicit use unless you can find a drug take-back program.
3. Find a drug-back program: Because of federal law, it is now easier to find and use programs that are organized at a local level for discards of unused medications.
4. Carefully trash your prescription medicines: Before trashing your medicines, remove them from the packaging, peel off any identifying information from containers, crush them and seal them in a plastic bag with some water to lower the risk of a child or animal eating the contents.