Brave New World - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 53

In January 2010, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement
with ive health-care facilities —two hospitals and three nursing homes—in upstate New
York that had been flushing painkillers, antibiotics, antidepressants, hormones, and
other drugs down toilets and sinks. Drugs disposed of this way usually flow to sewage
treatment plants or septic systems. Most treatment plants—even those that use chlorine
disinfectants—don't consistently remove pharmaceuticals, and septic systems have no
means of removing the drugs. Once they had been introduced into the water system,
trace amounts of the pharmaceuticals were discovered in the New York City watershed,
which provides drinking water to 9 million people. Alarm bells went off. Each facility
was fined between $3,500 and $12,000 for its violations and agreed to dispose of excess
pharmaceuticals at waste-management plants. But this was unusual; most states have
not researched “drug dumping,” and few health facilities have been fined for it, even as
flushing pharmaceuticals down the drain has become common practice.
While reducing the amount of drugs dumped into water systems by health-care fa-
cilities is good policy, far more pharmaceuticals end up in our tap water when people
excrete the small percentage of a drug that doesn't metabolize in the body. Nearly all
Americans excrete man-made chemical compounds or wash them off in the shower
or flush them down the toilet. Ever more pharmaceuticals and personal-care products,
or PPCPs, which include such substances as suntan lotion, perfume, and antibacterial
soap, are being detected in wastewater treatment plants or in groundwater and septic
systems.
One of the most common drugs found in biosolids—a residue produced by sewage
treatment plants that is used as a farm fertilizer—is triclocarban , an antibiotic that is
added to antimicrobial soaps. In most cases, triclocarban appeared in small amounts,
but several lab samples showed triclocarban present at levels as high as 440 parts per
million, which, according to ScienceNow,is almost ten times higher than ever reported
in biosolids before. The question this raised is, do antibiotics harm aquatic life or soil
microbes? The answer remains as yet unknown, but the EPA is examining it.
In 2008, the press began to report extensively on the drugs found in drinking water ,
raising public concern. The Associated Press (AP), for instance, ran an investigative
report headlined “Drugs Found in Drinking Water,” which included a string of dis-
turbing factoids: in Southern California, antianxiety and antiepileptic drugs were found
in drinking supplies; Tucson found three medications in its drinking water; Washing-
ton, DC, tested positive for six drugs; Philadelphia discovered a staggering fifty-six
pharmaceuticals or by-products in its treated drinking water. Of thirty-five watersheds
tested by scientists for the AP, twenty-eight had pharmaceuticals in them. The story also
noted that bottled water companies that use purified tap water—a common practice for