I just found this article from the on-line version of R&D Magazine.

It might have a little more detail and background than some of the other stuff I've seen. I found this quote, from someone in the pharmaceutical industry, interesting:

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

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I'd sure rather listen to screams of complaint than screams of pain (mine included, if I can't get Naproxen and try to walk on my bone spur).

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The concentrations measured in a few parts per billion or per trillion.

Could be sampling bias. Things like this can always use more study. It also would depend on the medication. Some do not need to be metabolized, and work directly. For some, the effective dose is meant to be saturating, but that doesn't mean that a lower dose has no effect. It's also dependent on how long the drugs stay in the system and can be concentrated by human or other biological systems.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

:-P. The water also has parts per billion lead, uranium, arsenic, ect. Your basement is outgassing radon. And that's natural. That these things are bad for us if we down tablets with our morning coffee doesn't mean it does diddly squat to us at that concentration. Every element on the periodic table is represented in some finite concentration in every single thing on earth!!! (well, those weird unstable ones off the end of the chart, maybe not.)

There has to be a threshhold beyond which we just have to be a little tough. I doubt we've ever had 100% pure de-ionized H2O as drinking water in the whole history of our civilization, and we're unlikely to eliminate every trace impurity.

In fact, there has to be a "get tough and deal with it" threshhold for a lot of things in life. No human activity is without some miniscule differential effect at any arbitrary distance removed! If we keep going after parts per trillion, miles away, we're going to be outlawing eating breathing and defecating! If we swoon at loud noises - no more air travel for you. If we can't stand formaldehyde in ppt quantities - bye bye plastics processing. If you can't stand being offended - no more freedom of speech or the press. It goes on and on.

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http://amssolarempire.blogspot.com

Excuse me? Apparently you don't understand what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that the drinking water is only a symptom. Since the symptom is not an issue at this time, then let's ignore it and go after the disease.

One thing that is driving me nuts about this whole thing is that nobody is distinguishing "drinking" water from "environmental" water.

They quote environmental studies, and then imply that the purification plants allow this through. Everything that I have seen tells me the purification plants are sufficient at this time.

Apples and Oranges. Fix our drinking water issue, and we still have environmental water issues.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

People can demand that water purification plants remove this perceived "threat" even if it can only be detected in the parts per billion or even parts per trillion levels. However, we should first determine if medications at these levels actually present any threat to health or safety. It would cost a lot of money to remove substances that dilute and the actual gain in safety might be zero. If that's the case, then the money would be much better spent on areas that can actually be improved such as highway safety or even poverty. There is only so much money to go around and if you spend it on minute "threats", you'll end up saving far fewer lives than if you target the funding on real problems. This is a good example of where a solid cost-benefit analysis is needed before we get a lot of knee-jerk demands for spending to correct this problem.

Detection limits for dioxin in drinking water are 2 ppq (parts per quadrillion). PPB detection limits have been standard technique since the mid '80s with advent of capillary column gas chromatography, and I understand that many "tuned" HPLC (High Pressure Liquid Chromatography) techniques give better matrix separation allowing for larger initial sample extract size thus leading to lower limits. It's the ability to separate the compounds that give us the detection limits.

A liter is about 55 moles of water. That's 6.02 * 10^23 molecules * 55 = 3.31 * 10^25 molecules. One in a billion water molecules is 3.31 * 10^16 molecules per liter; even accounting for differing molar masses, we're still talking over 10^14 molecules. I know from actual experience with GC/MS that the average nose can easily smell 50ppb of gasoline in water. Some other compounds such as ethyl mercaptan can be detected down to about 3 ppb. Since we are talking about compound that are specifically designed to interact with biological systems here it's important to know that there are pathways that are insanely sensitive. Catabolite repression systems for example. While, I wouldn't discount the danger of certain compounds, I would be more concerned about breeding drug resistant bacteria than as a direct personal threat.

Of course they are, but the difference between environmental "water" and "drinking" water isn't as big as you may think. There's a huge legal difference between one side of the purifier and the other; the analysis on the "drinking" water side is far more stringent and controlled. Even so, every drop we drink is originally "environmental" water.

Well, kinda of yes, and no. One of the problems with with the whole drinking water analysis is that they are testing using detectors and methodologies that detect known and regulated issues. I would say, based on many years of experience, that all of regularly run analyzes on drinking water would not see any of these compounds. While the filters probably are remediating the compounds, there's no quantitative proof of it. You have to remember that when dealing with the quantities that any municipality deals with, the purification is mainly about sterilization with chlorination (which causes other problems), filtration, and aeration. No city can afford "pure" water. The operative phrase here is "good enough for government work".

Is it really a big concern? Well it could be if it was the only problem. As it is, it's like worrying about if you've turned the oven off as your house burns from a napalm strike. Drinking water is more threatened by over-use and pollution. It's kinda hard to too excited about low level contamination when your aquifer has three meters of gasoline sitting on top of it from a ruptured underground tank. It's also a non issue when it's not rained for two years and your local rapid expanding metropolis of four million people have used up all of the available fresh water. Yes, this is a problem, but it's just lower on the list than most everything else. Road run off, petroleum leaks, fecal coliform, pesticides/herbicides, are a far more serious threat.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

Tell that to homeopaths...

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

Not just the ones "off the end of the chart"!

The longest half life of any isotope of Francium (element 87) is 22 minutes! It is estimated that at any given time there is less than 20 grams of it in the Earth's crust!

Technetium (element 43) is even rarer! It does not occur naturally on Earth!

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...to humans, I'm presuming, but...

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I'm curious how they were able to ascribe these effects to the pharmaceuticals as opposed to the teratogenic stew of industrial waste, petrochemical, metals, sewage that is commonly found in water ways at thousands to millions times of higher concentrations.

It seems to me that they're presuming an effect.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

Yeah, when one gets down to a few parts-per-trillion, there's all sorts of stuff swimmin' around in untreated water.

You can look at some of the research I linked to and/or google up lots more. For example, this Google Scholar search on "intersex fish pollutants" has 905 hits.

There are several types of experiments I've seen:
- looking at wild populations, for example upstream and downstream of a sewage treatment plant (this would be confounded by the other variables you mention)
- studying test animals in the laboratory by raising them in waters sampled from similar sites (similar confounding, but more controlled conditions and can look at entire life cycle)
- studying test animals in the laboratory with controlled addition of various substances at levels found in the environment (least vulnerable to effects you mention but may miss synergistic effects of multiple pollutants). Here is one example of such a study, looking at the pharmaceutical Ethynylestradiol. You can read all their protocols at the link.

I have seen examples of all these types of experiments and they have consistently seen such effects.

This is not new science. Research along these lines goes back well over a decade (in post # 18 I mention a reference from 1994). But, IMHO, because this report talks about what was found in human drinking water, it has gotten a lot more press.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Had to google that one:

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Heh. I know the term thanks to Lois McMaster Bujold. (Nice lady, too.)

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"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Waaaaay before a decade. I was doing packed column GC work, what?, 30 years ago on DDT in bird eggs. It's definitely not new science, and I'm not disagreeing with them, it's just so damn difficult to show cause and effect on really low level contamination in an already highly polluted environment.

Agreed, most popular science stories are written to either explain why you're fat or tell you how some new discovery will affect your car.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

I wasn't even including that work, though you are absolutely correct. I was just commenting about relatively more recent work, such as the intersexed fish.

And yes, hard to tell with just field work, but I think the controlled experiments in the laboratory, s