Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [50]
The levels of pharmaceuticals found in drinking water are infinitesimally low, in the range of parts per billion or parts per trillion. But their supplies are continually replenished. Scientists have recently made the connection between hormones in water and abnormalities in fish: males are growing female sex tissue. Like most pharmaceuticals, hormones aren’t designed to break down easily. They’re supposed to have an effect at low dosages with chronic use, and they only partly dissolve in water.
According to a report by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, a worldwide network of scientists and scientific institutions, more than two hundred species—aquatic and terrestrial—are known or suspected to have experienced adverse reactions to such endocrine disrupters as estrogen and its many synthetic mimics. But what are the effects on people?
In the United Kingdom, hormones in the environment have been linked with lowered sperm counts and gynecomastia—the development of breasts in men. A benign condition, gynecomastia is also on the rise in the United States. And breast cancer in males—linked with estrogen in both males and females—rose 26 percent between 1973 and 1998. The incidence of hypospadias, a birth defect of the penis, has increased in the United States and other countries; scientists have linked the condition to fetal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. In some Arctic villages, twice as many girls as boys are being born: scientists with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme link the skewed sex ratio to the mothers’ diet of walrus, seals, and polar bears, which consume estrogen-mimicking chemicals in their own diet.
What if the EPA, which is studying chemicals that interfere with the endocrine system, finds that they constitute a serious risk to human health? Wastewater treatment plants aren’t designed to remove hormones, to say nothing of traces of antidepressants, painkillers, and the plasticizers found in shampoo and other types of plastic bottles. But that doesn’t mean they can’t. The technology is out there, says Lynn Orphan, former president of the Water Environment Federation, which represents operators of municipal wastewater-treatment plants. “We can use activated carbon or membrane filters, which have tiny pores. There’s reverse-osmosis filtration and exposure to ozone or to ultraviolet light. Sometimes it’s just a matter of extra retention time in holding tanks.”
But the technologies aren’t cheap, especially when scaled up for day-to-day use on an entire city’s water. Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst on waste issues at the EPA, says, “The cost of putting them in place, plus their operation, is astronomical—hundreds of millions over the lifetime of a plant.” Kansas City’s Mike Klender, like other water-plant operators, has little to say about pharmaceuticals. The government doesn’t require him to look for or control them, and so he does neither.
Let’s say your drinking water is pristine: it contains no disinfection by-products, no traces of fertilizer or pesticides, no industrial pollutants, and respectably low levels of naturally occurring elements such as zinc, arsenic, sodium, and radon. Maybe you live in Fryeburg, Maine, where the water that goes into town pipes is pretty close to the water that goes into Poland Spring’s tanker trucks.