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Your neighborhood pharmacy -- now just a faucet away?
Good news! Thanks to the crack investigative team at the Associated Press, Americans who commonly use prescriptions for such things as mood swings, cholesterol, infections, asthma, epilepsy, or just those general pesky pains many of us have from a life spent abusing our bodies may never need to wait in line at the pharmacy again. Traces of medications used to treat those and other medical conditions were found at low levels in the drinking water supplies of at least 40 million Americans. Who knows what other, more popular pharmaceuticals reside at low levels in our drinking water? I wonder if I should go ahead and cancel that prescription of Cialis I called into the pharmacy (for a friend, I swear). My friend may just get the required dose to do the trick by tossing back a few more glasses of H20.*
But, before anyone out there gets too excited that a little extra “help” may be as close as the kitchen sink, don’t reach for the glass just yet. Some feel the mere fact these pharmaceuticals are in much of the nation’s drinking water should be cause for concern, and a reason to ask some tough questions of officials over at the EPA. A Senate subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) is scheduled to hold hearings very soon to find out how this could happen, what if any health risks continued exposure to traces of these medications could have on our most vulnerable populations (children and pregnant women) and, oh yeah -- why did it take a small group of over-worked and under-paid journalists at the AP to inform millions of Americans that their drinking water is laced with various pharmaceuticals? Isn't that the job of the federal agency with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in taxpayer funds?
*We're kidding, obviously.
[Photo by Meredith Farmer.]
I spend my days helping people try to understand the benefit of healthy bacteria in the gut, and how antibiotics kill those necessary bacteria.
A lot of my clients say, "Well I haven't taken antibiotics in over ten years."
Typically I respond, "Do you eat fish? Because farmed fish are fed doses of antibiotics. Do you eat meat or dairy? Because cows and pigs are pumped full of antibiotics."
Now I can add to my repitoire,"Do you drink tap water?"
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
When I lived in Germany every pharmacy was supposed to take back unused medications and discard of them in a regulated way. Although I do not know how they discarded it, it definitely seemed better to me than just throwing it into the trashcan, which was the advice I got from the local pharmacy where I am living in the US, after I asked them what to do with all the unused pharmaceuticals.
Would that not be a solution here? Pharmacies could be a collection site for the unused medications, and then they could be discarded in a safer way.
For anyone who isn't already aware of this: the FDA has recently been ADVISING people to flush defective (and recalled) Fentanyl duragesic patches down their toilets. Fentanyl is an extremely strong pain killer. (In the duragesic patch form it is released into the skin just like a nicotene patch. The patches in question where already leaking, hence the recall.) When I tried contacting the FDA and "surprisingly" they would not respond. What really surprised and concerned me was that I couldn't get a response, any direction, etc. from several enviromental organizations that I tried contacting, including The Sierra Club, about this.