Pharmaceuticals in Your Drinking Water – A Health Hazard

You have always believed that pharmaceuticals can only serve to promote human health and cure diseases. However, recent studies have proved that certain pharmaceuticals in your daily drinking water can prove to be extremely dangerous to your health. These new class of water contaminants and pollutants consist of drugs such as birth control oils, seizure medications, anti-depressants and antibiotics. Even cancer treatments and painkillers have been detected in various sources of drinking water, which prove to be quite harmful if drunk.

It is true that the concentration of such pharmaceuticals in drinking water is extremely low, but the presence of so many prescription drugs and over the counter drugs have begun to become a cause of worry for health experts

How do pharmaceuticals enter drinking water?

The most obvious source for pharmaceuticals contaminant is the pharmaceuticals industries, hospitals and other medical facilities. However, incidentally, households also contribute a lot to this contaminant in our drinking water. People are often seen to dispose of unused medicines by flushing them through the toilets. Again, human excreta may contain varied incompletely metabolized medicines. These flushed drugs can pass through the sewage treatment facilities and can pass into the waterways and lakes. This is how drinking water can be contaminated – something that even you have perhaps contributed.

Sometimes manures containing traces of pharmaceuticals can be spread on land and they may then percolate into the ground drinking water, thus contaminating it. The groundwater can also be contaminated when discarded pharmaceuticals are dumped as landfills or in dumpsters. Yet another source of pharmaceuticals contaminant in drinking water is the farm animals. Their indigested hormones, antibiotics and veterinary medicines can pass into the water, thereby passing on the unwanted pharmaceuticals into the water.

What are the risks of chronic exposure to pharmaceuticals?

Researchers have found that being exposed to random combinations of low-level pharmaceuticals have alarming effects on the human body. Scientists are concerned that many of the pharmaceutical drugs can go on to interfere with the production of important hormones in the human body. Chemicals that produce such effects are called endocrine disrupters. Again, the release of antibiotics in drinking water is a cause of worry since this may result in some of the highly dangerous, disease causing bacteria to become immune to treatment and hence, there might be a spate of drug resistant diseases among the masses.

Apart from being a health hazard for humans, pharmaceuticals in water pose to be the most dangerous for aquatic life. Anti-depressants in water have been blamed for the altered sperm levels and spawning patterns for fishes in the water.

Purifying your drinking water

So how do you purify your water so that pharmaceutical contaminants are not present in it? Unfortunately, there aren’t any fool proof methods of removing these contaminants from water. However, it has been found that charcoal filters are the most effective among all the water treatment options. Charcoal filters can be used to purify both your home drinking water, as well as the public waters. The good news is that a number of public water providers in the US have woken up to the dangers of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water and have begun to use charcoal filters to treat the water.