By testing your urine, doctors can tell if you recently did drugs. I’m guessing that’s because the urine will contain the drugs/metabolites/markers. What about pharmaceutical drugs/metabolites/markers? These are daily being flushed with ever-increasing regularity. Could this eventually become dangerous to the population at large, as more and more people are treated with pharmacological therapies?
In an article similar to this one, water-quality experts were testing Puget Sound waters for traces of caffeine in order to pinpoint cracked sewer pipes. Apparently the abundance of latte del grande’s dumped down the drain skew the results of these tests, not the diuretic effect of the coffee.
Whether the body holds on to other substances and allows less to pass into our apparently fragile sewer systems, I don’t have a clue.
Quite possibly. Aspirin, Estrogens, Prozac, Prilosec and Claritan are just a few of the chemicals now showing up in rivers and streams. Table 2 from http://www.fpinva.org/ProductsEnv.htm gives a good review of what is being found where, and in what concentrations. The estrogens may be messing with fish and frogs, and SSRI’s accelerates the spawning of some forms of sealife, but no one seems very sure about what all this other stuff could be up to.
Thanks for the links!
Although from http://www.fpinva.org/ProductsEnv.htm : “Another question is whether the pharmaceuticals remaining in water used for domestic purposes poses long-term risks for human health after lifetime ingestion via potable waters multiple times a day of very low, subtherapeutic doses of numerous pharmaceuticals; this issue, however, is not addressed in this review.”
Nor anywhere else. I guess the answer is that there is no answer. Subtherapeutic doses of ASA I can live with, but estrogen? No thanks.
Funny you should ask. Some strange things have been happening to fish near some of our ocean outfalls (thought to be due to hormones from birth control pills and HRT passed into the sewerage). This has now raised the question of what other elements in human waste have the longterm potential to find their way into the food chain with unforeseen consequences. I’ll see if I can find the weekend newspaper article online.
One looming threat is the proliferation of drug resistant bacteria in the environment due to antibiotics that aren’t removed in wastewater treatment processes. The thoery is that naturally occuring pathogenic bacteria living in water containing low levels of common antibiotics will produce resistant strains.
And research on endocrine disrupters in the environment is a pretty hot topic too.