Tiny amounts of medicines (such as antibiotics, hormones and others) have been found in drinking water. They get there in several ways: some people flush unwanted medicines down the toilet, people taking medicines pass part of them in their urine or stool, and some medicines stay in water even after waste water is treated.
The levels are very low, measured in parts per billion or trillion, so water companies say the water is safe, while the government says it can't be certain these levels are harmless.
Some experts link medicines in drinking water, especially the contraceptive pill, with sewage contamination, and this may explain fish in the Potomac River and elsewhere with both male and female features, some with both testes and ovaries. Some experts also say we can't assume the levels are too low to matter, as hormones act on the body at very low concentrations.
Boiling water doesn't solve the problem, and bottled water doesn't either, as about 25% of it is bottled from the tap. In the US, bottled water labels regulated by the FDA show whether the water comes from a municipal source; companies that further treat tap water by reverse osmosis, distillation or other methods label it, for example, "purified water". Some home filter systems, such as reverse osmosis, can reduce the levels of medicines in water.
You can help by not flushing unused medicines away: return them to a pharmacy take-back scheme instead.
Like
Love
Angry
Dislike
