I blogged about pharmaceutical drugs in our water yesterday. Turns out that Seed Magazine got the story as far back as April 6, 2007.
“Little is definitively known,” says the EPA, “regarding any real hazard posed by trace concentrations.”
That’s partially a function of testing equipment; it wasn’t until the late 1990s that technology became readily available to detect drugs at subtherapeutic levels. “It still takes specialized equipment,” said Dana Kolpin, a US Geological Survey expert on emerging contaminants. “But in reality [these compounds] have probably been out there as long as we’ve been using pharmaceuticals.”
The FDA ascertains effects of therapeutic doses in people over a brief window, not what tiny quantities do over a lifetime.
A 2005 joint USGS-CDC study which found the anti-seizure medication carbamazepine in a stream, for instance, noted that a person would have to drink two liters of stream water daily for 70 years to get even a tenth of a therapeutic dose of the medication.
But merely pointing to low drug concentrations doesn’t allay the concerns of a growing number of researchers. On the contrary, it deepens several mysteries as to the ultimate effect of pharmaceutical contaminants on the environment and on people.
Illustration: Jimmy Turrell
