"We know we are being exposed to other people's drugs through our drinking water, and that can't be good," says Dr. David Carpenter, who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment of the State University of New York at Albany.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Drink your pharmaceuticals
An interesting report on the state of our drinking water appeared today on CNN. We've often heard of municipal drinking water being polluted with things like lead, MTBA, pesticides, etc. But this report talks about finding lots of different pharmaceuticals in our drinking water - everything from sex hormones to antibiotics to, yep, antidepressants. Actually in some places more than 50 different drugs were detected. While the amounts are very tiny (ppb or ppt) very little is known about the effects of even small amounts of drugs over a long period of time like decades. I think Dr. David Carpenter says it best:
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Question from the young & ignorant: how effective do you think an activated charcoal filter might be at removing this stuff?
Eat Halal and be healthy... Mentally, spiritually and physically!!..
Not to worry. Almost all the drugs we use work by binding to proteins (except drugs which you have to take a lot of like alcohol). A dissociation constant is always definable for such an interaction, and at very low concentrations of the drug there is essentially no binding. As chemists we all know this, but the public does not. We should be doing a better job.
The story of dioxin is particularly instructive. After the spill at Seveso essentially nothing happened despite media hysteria. The following notes of mine are old but good.
[ New England J. Med. vol. 324 pp. 212 - 218 '91 ] A large study of people exposed to dioxin shows that there is minimal excessive cancer mortality in most workers. Some 5172 workers in 12 plants were studied. All subjects in the study had at least 20 years from first exposure to develop cancer. The group with high exposure had a 50% excess risk of dying of cancer (mostly in soft tissue carcinomas). Exposure to other drugs weren't studied. Very little happened to anyone after the spill at Seveso in Italy. [ Public Health Rep. vol. 117 pp. 315 - 323 '02 ] Dioxins have been detected in the blood of virtually every person tested (at what level though?). They are present in the fat of breast milk, and can cross the placenta from mother to fetus.
[ Science vol. 263 pp. 1545 - 1546 '94 ] A very interesting letter takes apart the 5 studies cited as showing an increased risk of cancer from dioxin. Few of them actually make this claim. The evidence is really quite weak, including the fact that those with the highest exposure to dioxin at Seveso didn't show an increase.
[ Science vol. 251 pp 624 - 626 '91 ] An interesting article shows that to produce any effect at all, dioxin must bind to a receptor (the aromatic hydrocarbon receptor (Ah receptor, aryl hydrocarbon receptor ). This receptor is found inside the cell, where it activates transcription of certain genes by binding to the regulatory portion of the DNA for the gene. This implies that, contrary to current regulatory policy, there is a level of dioxin which will produce no effects (as there is essentially no receptor binding). The European levels for exposure are 170 to 1700 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's 1 to 10 picograms/kilogram/day.
Retread
Can we assume that this is also true of our bottled water since its source is from municipal water supplies? Does their process of reverse osmosis do anything to decrease the (already low) levels of contaminates?
hi
very useful information...thanks for passing it on....looking forward to your future blog updates...
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