Drugs ARE in our water. Would you really like Prozac dressing your salad?

Stop and think for a minute: where does the water from houses, industrial plants, farms, and feedlots go after we’ve used it? How does it again become pure enough to drink? Is it really pure?

Despite the evidence, the “body burden” uproar is lacking much thought about one category of chemicals that have been intentionally developed because they act like body chemical messengers: pharmaceuticals. Perhaps the pharmaceutical lobby is too big to overcome, or maybe there are other reasons, but the fact of the matter is there is a particular source of chemical that deserves your utmost attention.

Antihistamines, antibiotics, antidepressants—how about a little dose of anti-choice? Amid the uproar about finding industrial chemicals in everyone—from people to Antarctic penguins to arctic polar bears—the outcry is perhaps a bit too quiet regarding chemicals we segregate into a special class and call “pharmaceuticals.”
Nearly fifteen years of studies may be worth chatting about over dinner, particularly when viewed against the backdrop of our bodies’ capacity to store fat-soluble chemicals—both definitive toxins (e.g., Agent Orange) and drugs (e.g., phencyclidine [1]).

This must change. A recent nationwide U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) [2] tested water in 30 states for 95 different prescription and nonprescription drugs and found:

75 percent of the water tested contained two or more drugs.
54 percent of samples had more than five drugs.
34 percent of samples had more than 10 drugs.
13 percent of samples had more than 20 drugs.

What types of drugs were found? Painkillers, tranquilizers, anti-depressants, antibiotics, birth control pills and chemotherapy agents, to name a few.

Although it made headline news, this is not the first report of drugs in your drinking water. In 1976 and 1977, U.S. researchers found cholesterol-lowering medication, in addition to nicotine, caffeine, and ibuprofen in samples of water from a sewage treatment plant in Kansas City [3]. The issue was virtually forgotten until the early 1990s, when environmental scientists in Germany found cholesterol drugs and painkillers in the groundwater beneath a sewage treatment plant.

With modern testing techniques making measurement far simpler, the past decade has revealed substances like antibiotics, blood pressure reducers, hormones, psychiatric drugs, and pain killers in treated water leaving sewage plants and in the rivers, streams, and lakes that receive discharge from these plants.

Drugs permanently change our bodies.

A long-held belief is that the drug you take today is gone tomorrow. That's turning out not to be true. No one really knows how long a drug stores in the body, and recent data suggests it may be longer than we think [4]. Given that mind-altering pharmaceuticals—along with personal care products—are emerging as common contaminants in our drinking water supply, purification technology is particularly important given emerging evidence that even low doses of drugs and chemicals create long-lasting effects.

The common way to test safety is to see if a chemical causes cancer. Forward thinkers like Rachel Carlson in her book Silent Spring, and more recently Theo Colburn in Our Stolen Future, look at greater detail. Many chemicals mimic our bodies’ hormones. Hormones are one way of communicating what each part of the body is doing, and providing it with its needs. For example, there are hormones that communicate hunger, others that communicate the satisfaction and fullness felt after that incredible meal, others still that communicate whether a fetus becomes a boy or a girl.

When these systems are disrupted by chemical contaminants, everything changes. One of the first changes is gender—fewer male babies, and in extreme cases male babies with female parts. There are effects on cognitive function, even mood and energy level.

How drugs get into the water you drink.

In the United States, cows and swine excrete a daily mix of 30-110 kilograms of hormones (estradiol and estrone; both are female hormones). These hormones are given to feedlot animals to improve growth rate and profitability.

In Connecticut, residents in retirement communities are advised to flush drugs down their toilets, quietly serving-up a poison appetizer to both the Pomperaug River riparian ecosystem and to their fellow Southbury, Connecticut residents downstream.

On a typical American morning, a woman takes a contraceptive dose of hormones, washing it down with a grande, non-fat cappuccino. She gives her young son a dose of an antibiotic to treat his ear infection. Her husband swallows a medication to control his high blood pressure and pops two pain pills for his headache. Their college-aged daughter, suffering from depression, consumes her daily dose of anti-depressant and lights up her first cigarette of the day.

Although we consume more and more drugs each day, most Americans rarely consider where the contents of this country’s vast medicine cabinet will end up. Researchers say the amount of pharmaceuticals and personal care products released into the environment each year is the same as the amount of pesticides released: 888 million pounds. This is about three pounds per year for each U.S. man, woman and child.

Low doses of drugs have an enormous impact on health.

U Mass researcher Ed Calabrese [5] recently shattered the assumption that above a certain dose a drug or toxin has a certain effect, while below that dose, the effect disappears (often labeled “beneficial” in the case of drugs, “harmful” in the case of chemicals—although that distinction is hardly cut-and-dried). Dr. Calabrese showed that all of the 2189 cancer drugs tested (yes, that number is 2,189, and every drug worked this way!) slowed or stopped cell growth (the “beneficial” effect) at high doses. However; at low doses, the drugs enhanced growth, the opposite of what one wants in a cancer drug. Dr. Calabrese confirmed a pattern that has been known since 1888 (the Arndt-Schulz law law) and has since continued his research to include chemicals as diverse as dioxin and heroin.

When one considers both sub-threshold effects and interactive synergy, low-level contamination data become suddenly significant. Environmental regulations and how little of a chemical is an acceptable level of contamination takes on new meaning.

Emerging data from groups as diverse as the Environmental Working Group, the World Wildlife Fund and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show patterns of toxic build-up within people that are similar to the patterns in the environment. While we’ve managed to reduce some contaminants—such as lead as a result of regulatory action—far too many unappetizing chemicals are rapidly becoming part of our internal toxic soup. Seasoned with chemical flavorings that no good cook would use, this distasteful soup tends to mirror the equivalently seasoned stew of our polluted surroundings.

What can we do?

Recently, a report released by committee of the National Research Council (NRC) noted the value of human biomonitoring, a first step toward at least keeping track of the grim progression of this pollution. Responding to the report, the California legislature set up a state biomonitoring program that would sample residents on a voluntary basis. As with the story on lead, monitoring—or paying attention—can reverse the contamination and adverse health effects. As articulated by committee chair, Thomas Burke of Johns Hopkins, “biomonitoring is going to play a major role in the future of environmental health.” Similarly to a police detective’s using a poisoned victim to establish an evidentiary chain, pharmaceutical companies should now answer to the justified accusation that they are manufacturing and releasing toxic chemicals into the environment. The fact that these toxic chemicals move through the bodies of humans (or feedlot animals) first doesn't make them any less toxic to our environment.

Since the only questions are: How negative? and Why wait? The time is now to begin to demand monitoring and regulation. Pharmaceuticals should be regulated by the EPA, and they should not be allowed in our rivers and streams, and in a very real sense, pharmaceutical companies should be held financially responsible for the environmental damage caused by their chemical products—on people and the other inhabitants of our ecosystem. It is time to create a legislative ‘Stop’ sign so that everyone has freedom of choice over their health diet.

Reference List

1.Personal Care Products Council (PCPC). How cosmetics are regulated. 2005. 2008.
Rec #:

2.Kolpin DW, Furlong ET, Meyer MT, et al: Pharmaceuticals, hormones, and other organic wastewater contaminants in U.S. streams, 1999-2000: a national reconnaissance. Environ Sci Technol 2002; 36: 1202-11.

3.Hignite C, Azarnoff DL: Drugs and drug metabolites as environmental contaminants: chlorophenoxyisobutyrate and salicyclic acid in sewage water effluent. Life Sci 1977; 20: 337-41.

4.Cecchini M, LoPresti V: Drug residues store in the body following cessation of use: impacts on neuroendocrine balance and behavior--use of the Hubbard sauna regimen to remove toxins and restore health. Med Hypotheses 2007; 68: 868-79.

5.Calabrese EJ, Blain R: The occurrence of hormetic dose responses in the toxicological literature, the hormesis database: an overview. Toxicol Appl Pharmacol 2005; 202: 289-301.

Article Source: http://www.articlesinsight.com

Dr Conrad Maulfair of the Maulfair Medical Center is a board member of several integrative medicine associations. International author, speaker and retired Colonel U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corp. Find out how an active lifestyle can be accomplished with restorative healthcare based on accurate research.

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