I just read this here and was wondering what y'all think.

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

Not mentioned as well: the mechanism in the news a few months ago, people dispose of unused pills in the toilet. In those stories we were advised to use garbage to dispose of pills, and to make the pills unusable by mixing with used cat litter or other foul matter.

MSNBC: Don’t flush leftover meds — mix with kitty litter

I'm finding it's a great way to meet your new neighbors -- coming over to borrow a cup of used kitty litter.

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According to my pharmacist (I'm on very good terms with my pharmacist, as I'm sure you can imagine), you shouldn't throw them away, either, because they'll dissolve and end up the in the groundwater anyway. I should imagine it's a bigger problem here, because our water table is awfully high. In fact, you're supposed to take them to a specified disposal site, where--I believe--they burn them. However, the nearest disposal site for me is at McCord Air Force Base, up near Tacoma, so it's a bit out of my way.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

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

Drugs have been detected? Pronouncements like that always make me think to myself - what are the detectable limits involved?

From the article:

"To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose."

I think I'll worry about something else.

Over here you are supposed to return unused medication to the pharmacist and they then ship it to a disposal facility.
I'm sure that that has more to do with safety, then environmental concerns.

On another note, apparently removing the components from urine itself is the most expensive phase of cleaning water.
A separate infrastructure to collect urine is however economically non-viable. (For now.)

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"To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose."

I think I'll worry about something else.

On CNN Headline News this morning, they explained that you'd have to drink anywhere from 300,000 to 3 million glasses of water to get the equivalent dosage of one 81 mg aspirin. Admittedly, there are some medications that are effective at lower dosages than that aspirin but your point remains - this dosage is soo low that you'll die of water intoxication long before you even begin to approach even the lowest threshold of human sensitivity to the medications.

When you can detect stuff in the parts per billion or parts per trillion range, you'd going to find all sorts of things in the air, in your water, and in your food. Just remember the old axiom - its the dose that makes the poison.

I find it interesting that we can detect organic molecules at the part per trillion level.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

I find this unsurprising. It has been know for several years that various pharmaceuticals were found in sewer discharges (even from treated sewage). It makes sense that it would show up in drinking water. To the best of my knowledge, most water treatment systems (either for drinking water or sewage) are not designed to deal with these contaminants.

On the flip side, I wouldn't lightly dismiss the effects of parts-per-billion contaminants. Sure, it is not going to be a therapeutic dose. But some of these pollutants have been found to have effects on wildlife at levels found in our water supplies. And while the individual glass of water will have very little of any given pharmaceutical, their may be combined effects from many different ones and from cummulative effects over many years.

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

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

That ability has existed for years, particularly if you know exactly what you are looking for.

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

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

What's the worst that could happen? I already have a third arm.

Are they looking for the "exact" molecules by proxy or are they segregating and then measuring?

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

What recent studies, what effects, and what is the threshold level of "alarming"?

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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

There, that's the kind of reality I was looking for.
So; 1 aspirin for an entire lifespan.

I would think that the more potent the medicine, the less likely it would be introduced/prescribed, and therefore not be a larger threat.

Compared to everything else we do to the environment, I bet it's only a drop in the bucket (pun intended).


From the article:
Excuse me? Flouride has been shown to fullfill a need to society (suposedly everyone benefits). That's not true of pharmaceuticals.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Back in the 1970s, there was a study that claimed a link between drinking sodas sweetened by sacarine and bladder cancer. It turned out that a person would have to drink the equivalent of over 700 sodas a day for years to run an increased cancer risk. Some people immediately began pressing for a ban on sacarine. I looked at those numbers and thought sacarine must be incredibly safe for it to take so much to cause a cancer risk. In fact, I never used the product until that study showed it was so safe.

If you're having to go to the parts per billion or parts per trillion to detect something in drinking water, that to me says the stuff is about as safe as it's humanly possible to make anything.

I'm not sure what you mean by proxy? There are two ways one might approach this, you check a water sample for whatever you can find in it (look for everything) or you can check for a specific compound. The look for everything approach is much more diificult, particularly for the hundreds of thousands of organic compounds known. So you have to use some pretty broadly applicable methods and your detection limits are not as good.

I don't know how they did this study, but I suspect they went looking for specific things. Maybe picked the top ten or twenty most widely used drugs and went looking for those. There are methods for searching for specific compounds that are good to parts-per-billion levels or better.

In the next week or two, some of the weekly science publications I get (such as Science News and Chemical & Engineering News) should have this story with, I assume, a lot more detail.

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

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

I think the concern may be more about the potential future hazard as more people take more medicines, putting more into the sewage system, and possible drug interactions.

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

And also from the accumulation of certain drugs that don't degrade.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

See my link above for one reference.

Another report (2005) on environmental effects from the Environmental Health Perspectives On-line.
I have read multiple studies like this and many were done at concentrations found in these ecosystems (parts-per-billion). For example, there is this one from Science News from 2003.
This is from the University of Arizona, Water Resources Research Center
I personally think the synergistic effects of multiple contaminants over long periods of time are the most potentially troubling concern.

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

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009