Antibiotics in Your Drinking Water

Small quantities of antibiotics, pain relievers, birth control pills, caffeine and perfumes are passing through the nations sewage treatment plants and into the surface waters of river and lakes unmonitored and unregulated. Although not well understood the chemicals are no doubt having an effect on the ecology of the lakes, streams and even ground water that the treated sewage is dumped into. And they are likely showing up in human drinking water in downstream intakes. Some scientists are concerned that the presence of low levels of antibiotics in drinking water will increase the trend of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. "The fact that these chemicals get into the environment should show that every individual, whatever they do, affects the environment in one way or the other," said Christian Daughton, a researcher with the US Environmental Protection Agency. Daughton led a session on pharmaceuticals in water at the American Chemical Society's http://www.acs.org annual meeting in San Francisco in March. Daughton noted that sewage sludge contaminated with caffeine, aspirin and nicotine had been discovered by his agency 20 years ago. The finding was ignored then but the problem grew. At the Chemical Society's session researchers from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported that they had found as many as 100 compounds, in low levels, downstream from Kansas City, Missouri sewage treatment plants and stock yards. Caffeine was one of the highest level contaminants - one cientist called it the Starbucks effect - but there were other chemicals such as tetracycline, anti-depressants, chemotherapy agents and an estrogen replacement called Premarin. "We don't know what the combined effects of these are," said Donald Wilkinson, one of the USGS scientists. A German chemist, Thomas Heberer, reported that he had found high levels of chemical fragrances used in perfumes, shampoos, detergents and sun blocking compounds accumulating in the flesh of carp, perch, eels and other fish swimming downriver from a Berlin sewage outlet. David Epel, of Stanford University, expressed particular concern over the possibility of a new type of drugs call efflux-pump inhibitors being dumped into the aquatic environment. Eflux-pump inhibitors are designed to keep microbes from ejecting antibiotics intended to kill them. Eflux pumps are used by all animals to remove toxicants. What happens if wild life and human eflux pumps are inhibited by ingesting minute quantities of the new drugs through drinking water, Epel wondered. Drugs aren't just passing through human and livestock bodies and ending up in the water. They are contaminating the soil as well.

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