Is your drinking water keeping you from getting pregnant? Is the water coming out of your faucet safe? Over the years we have heard of stories of contaminated drinking water. We have heard about mercury, lead, or agricultural run off potentially contaminating our water supply. Even the movie Erin Brockovich detailed the story of a toxic chemical, contaminating a town’s water supply resulting in a multitude of health problems and death. Those are the extreme. Right? The typical metropolis water treatment facility removes all these contaminants. We don’t have to worry about hexavalent chromium getting in the tap water I drink, like it did in Erin Brockovich. What if is isn’t the exotic chemical or pollutant you have to worry about, but caffeine, birth control pills, acetominiphen, or heart medications that’s polluting your water? More importantly what if these pharmaceuticals are damaging your fertility and keeping you from get pregnant.
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According to an investigation by the Associated Press 41,000,000 Americans are exposed to pharmaceutical drugs in their drinking water. Although the amounts are small, measured in parts per billions or trillions, and the water suppliers assure us our water is safe, no one knows the long term effects of consuming the combination of all these drugs.
How do the drugs get there? It’s believed that we take pills, our body absorbs a certain amount, and the rest we excrete as urine or feces, and flush down the toilet. The residues end up in our waster water, which in then treated, and recycled back to us for consumption. Also, veterinary drugs given to livestock and pets also end up in our water supply.
The long term health effects of pharmaceutical exposure in unknown. The Fox News article, Study Finds Traces of Drugs in Drinking Water in 24 Major U.S. Cities, explains the potential health risks beter than I can.
“Our bodies may shrug off a relatively big one-time dose, yet suffer from a smaller amount delivered continuously over a half century, perhaps subtly stirring allergies or nerve damage.
Pregnant women, the elderly and the very ill might be more sensitive.”“Many concerns about chronic low-level exposure focus on certain drug classes: chemotherapy that can act as a powerful poison; hormones that can hamper reproduction or development; medicines for depression and epilepsy that can damage the brain or change behavior; antibiotics that can allow human germs to mutate into more dangerous forms; pain relievers and blood-pressure diuretics.”
“‘These are chemicals that are designed to have very specific effects at very low concentrations. That’s what pharmaceuticals do. So when they get out to the environment, it should not be a shock to people that they have effects,’ says zoologist John Sumpter at Brunel University in London, who has studied trace hormones, heart medicine and other drugs.”“And while drugs are tested to be safe for humans, the timeframe is usually over a matter of months, not a lifetime. Pharmaceuticals also can produce side effects and interact with other drugs at normal medical doses. That’s why — aside from therapeutic doses of fluoride injected into potable water supplies — pharmaceuticals are prescribed to people who need them, not delivered to everyone in their drinking water.”
My concern is the long term exposure to sex hormones and other drugs from our drinking water may have a negative the
effect on your fertility.
Certain drugs are known to
compromise fertility in women. Hormones, antibiotics, and antihypertensives medications can prevent the embryo from implanting in the uterus. If taken near the middle of the menstrual cycle Motrin, Anaprox, Indocin, and aspirin can prevent ovulation. Antidepressants and painkillers may increase your prolactin levels and cause ovulation failure.
These are some of the medications which were discovered in the drinking water of major cities:
56 medications including medications for pain, infections, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness, and high cholesterol were discovered in the Philadelphia water supply.
Antibiotics were found in the drinking water of Tucson.
According to the Fox News article, “Cattle, for example, are given ear implants that provide a slow release of trenbolone, an anabolic steroid used by some bodybuilders, which causes cattle to bulk up. But not all the trenbolone circulating in a steer is metabolized. A German study showed 10 percent of the steroid passed right through the animals. Water sampled downstream of a Nebraska feedlot had steroid levels four times as high as the water taken upstream. Male fathead minnows living in that downstream area had low testosterone levels and small heads.”
A study from the University of Montreal detailed how the Montreal water treatment facility dumps 90 times the critical amounts of estrogen. The estrogens studied not only included natural estrogens but synthetic estrogens from birth control pills and
hormone replacement therapy used for menopausal symptoms.
Here’s the take home point. Scientifically, we know that pharmaceuticals damage wildlife producing changes to the reproductive systems of fish and reptiles. On the other hand, we don’t know if any harm comes to humans from exposure to pharmaceuticals in our drinking water. We also don’t know whether long term consumption is safe. To put it in perspective, if you’re a 30 year old women you have been exposed to tiny amount of pharmaceutical every time you went to your faucet for a drink for the past 30 years. Could unnecessary
exposure to hormones, antibiotics, antidepressants, and other drugs over the past 30 years, effect you health? Possibly. I would suggest most likely. Either way, it’s not a medical experiment I would choose to participate in.
