this totally blew my mind...
When residents of Heritage Village and two other nearby retirement communities flush their toilets, wastewater laced with traces of prescription drugs rushes through a series of pipes into the Heritage Village treatment plant. This flushing is the main pathway by which pharmaceuticals enter the environment. Hospitals and nursing homes routinely dump unused or expired pills down the toilet, and consumers have been advised to do the same; effluent from pharmaceutical manufacturers also ends up at municipal wastewater treatment plants. Through a process of settling and aeration, the Heritage Village plant separates liquids from solids, treats the liquid portion with disinfectant, and then discharges this effluent into a mini-creek that meanders between the third green and the seventh tee of the Heritage Village golf course. Making its way through a riparian band of oaks and maples, the creek fans out into the Pomperaug River, which loops without further interruption through the town of Southbury.
The Pomperaug looks no different upstream or down, but studies by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on other rivers suggest that the Pomperaug below the effluent creek carries the signatures of drugs consumed by anyone plumbed into the Heritage Village system. The effect of those drugs on the environment, and possibly on those who drink water pumped from those streams, is only beginning to be understood.
We are a nation obsessed with pharmaceuticals. We spend vast sums to manage our health, and we pop pills to address every conceivable symptom. Some elderly Americans take as many as 30 drugs a day, some of them merely to counteract the effects of others. Prescription drug sales rose by an annual average of 11 percent between 2000 and 2005. Americans now fill more than three billion prescriptions a year; nationwide, more than 10 million women take birth-control pills, and about the same number are on hormone-replacement therapy.
The rate at which prescriptions are dispensed is only going up as the population ages. Already, those over 65 fill twice as many prescriptions per year as do younger Americans. Inevitably, more drugs will be headed into waterways like the Pomperaug. Our rivers -- already stressed by pollutants, groundwater pumping, reduced flows, and overburdened wastewater treatment plants that dump raw sewage -- will be ever less able to cope.
Alarmed by data that showed trace levels of pharmaceuticals in European streams, researchers in the United States have begun to survey our nation's waterways. In 2002, the USGS published the results of its first-ever reconnaissance of man-made contaminants. Using highly sensitive assays, the agency found traces of 82 different organic contaminants -- fertilizers and flame retardants as well as pharmaceuticals -- in surface waters across the nation. These drugs included natural and synthetic hormones, antibiotics, antihypertensives, painkillers, and antidepressants.
Now that science has documented the presence of free-flowing pharmaceuticals, researchers are faced with another, far more difficult, pair of questions: What does this mean for the environment, and what does it mean for us? Early evidence of harm to aquatic organisms is giving researchers grounds for real concern.
Source: AlterNet: EnviroHealth: How Prescription Drugs Are Poisoning Our Waters
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