Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1376
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Batt S.
Drugs in the Water: We Must Put the Genie Back in the Bottle
2003 Aug 7
Full text:
During the past year, headlines have alerted the public to an unsettling fact: Canada’s lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater contain trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs that can enter our drinking water.
The growing list includes plenty one would prefer not to down in a glass of water on a hot day: antibiotics and painkillers, hormones and tranquilizers, drugs to treat blood cholesterol, epilepsy and cancer, musk fragrances, and phthalates — a family of chemicals found in cosmetics, perfumes and hair products.
We don’t yet know how these chemicals may affect human health but the animal previews include reproductive and brain disorders. To its credit, the federal government has been working for the past two years on a plan to protect Canadians’ health from this emerging potential threat.
A project with the acronym EARP (for Environmental Assessment Regulations Project) has been wending its way through the bureaucracy and will surface this fall. Unfortunately, EARP’s focus has veered off the mark. If the project continues on its present path, the environment that sustains our health will garner less protection than the drug and toiletry industry’s bottom line.
Because this form of pollution comes largely from personal (not industrial) use of chemicals, public awareness is key. The entire population needs to grasp the problem, see the range of potential solutions, and engage in a process of change. Prevention should be paramount, a principle that gets lip service in EARP documents. The fastest way to reduce the environmental burden of drugs and toiletries is for everyone to use them less.
Oddly, EARP materials never mention reduced use. As someone who took part in several EARP consultations, I believe the reason for this is simple: the process was geared to assuaging industry fears of added costs and lost revenues. Health and environmental groups, when consulted at all, faced a pre-set, legalistic agenda, drafted by government lawyers for their industry counterparts.
Personal use chemicals get into the environment in the most prosaic of ways.
Fifty to 90 percent of a drug’s active ingredients are excreted and enter the sewage system; from there they may pass to a water treatment plant that is not designed to remove them. Unused drugs get flushed down the toilet or sink (parents have been told to do this, for the safety of children).
Hospitals and nursing homes dispose of vast quantities of pharmaceuticals, untouched when residents change or discontinue medication, or die. Drugs taken in life’s home stretch likely contaminate posthumously, leaching from cemeteries into groundwater. Farmers give veterinary drugs to their animals, including large amounts of antibiotics. Drug-contaminated sewage sludge is sold as farm fertilizer.
Drugs aren’t the whole problem: soaps, shampoos, cosmetics and perfumes contain chemical ingredients that disappear down the drain, but persist in the ecosystem.
Calling the result a “chemical soup” sounds over the top when concentrations may be as little as one part per trillion. But science suggests that chronic exposure to multiple bioactive substances may well harm human health, even at low levels. Drugs are designed to have effects in small quantities; they are not meant to be mixed, willy-nilly. Researchers are discovering “windows of vulnerability” when developing embryos are exquisitely sensitive to chemicals, even minute amounts. Since environmental tests for these substances are still evolving, the quantities detected so far are just the beginning.
As its name suggests, EARP is mostly about new regulations. Beginning sometime in the coming year, Health Canada will require drug companies and other manufacturers to expand their product safety tests. New products will have to pass tests of toxicity after release into the environment, not just during use. Tests will be phased in for products already on the market.
Manufacturers are nervous. What if the new tests are expensive, slow down marketing, reduce international competitiveness, or keep some products off the market altogether? These are natural questions for manufacturers to ask, but they are the wrong questions to guide a program to protect health and the environment. If my prescription meds can end up in your morning coffee, every home medicine cabinet is a public concern.
Fortunately, plenty can be done. In a series of wide-ranging papers published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, scientist Christian Daughton of the US Environmental Protection Agency lays out a grand plan for the short, medium and long-term.
His short-term suggestions range from curtailing ads that promote drug use to consumers, to restricting physician drug samples, reducing drug dosages, developing smaller package sizes, exploring non-toxic alternative treatments, and recycling, rather than disposing of, some unused drugs.
He cites an Ontario survey estimating that the province wastes over $40 million in medications each year.
Eliminating inappropriate drug use, overuse, waste and abuse will, Daughton argues, improve health, save money and help protect the environment.
That’s a message we can all tape to the medicine cabinet mirror.
