{"id":5540,"date":"2016-10-01T21:27:37","date_gmt":"2016-10-02T02:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=5540"},"modified":"2016-10-01T21:27:37","modified_gmt":"2016-10-02T02:27:37","slug":"water-water-water-the-dangers-of-recycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/10\/01\/water-water-water-the-dangers-of-recycling\/","title":{"rendered":"Water, Water, Water: The Dangers of Recycling"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the options often used to wisely consume water is recycling: collecting water that has been used once, often by residents for excretion, clean it, and send it back for more use. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Not always, as Anthony King reports<\/a> in NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (17 September 2016, paywall):<\/p>\n

Excreted and flushed through our sewage works and waterways, drug molecules are all around us. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water.<\/p>\n

The amounts that end up in your glass are minuscule, and won\u2019t lay you low tomorrow. However, someone prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know what it means if you have a lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations,\u201d says Klaus K\u00fcmmerer<\/a> at the University of L\u00fcneburg, Germany.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even what we might consider fresh water isn’t so fresh:<\/p>\n

Paul Bradley<\/a> of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren\u2019t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology<\/em>, doi.org\/bqdb<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back in 2013, Scientific American<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0reprinted<\/a> a report from Environmental Health News<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0on the efficacy of water treatment facilities:<\/p>\n

Only about half of the prescription drugs and other newly emerging contaminants in sewage are removed by treatment plants.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the finding of a new report by the International Joint Commission, a consortium of officials from the United States and Canada who study the Great Lakes.<\/p>\n

The impact of most of these \u201cchemicals of emerging concern\u201d on the health of people and aquatic life remains unclear. Nevertheless, the commission report concludes that better water treatment is needed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe compounds show up in low levels \u2013 parts per billion or parts per trillion \u2013 but aquatic life and humans aren\u2019t exposed to just one at a time, but a whole mix,\u201d said Antonette Arvai, physical scientist at the International Joint Commission and the lead author of the study. \u201cWe need to find which of these chemicals might hurt us.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> report explored the possibility of less stable drugs (i.e., shelf-life), which might make pharmaceuticals more resource intensive (in my view), so I wonder if an alternative would be to require the pharmaceutical companies to also do the research to discover how to remove the remnants of their drugs from the water supply – or to guarantee the human body completely absorbs it. Extra points if they can report that common treatment options already remove the drug remains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the options often used to wisely consume water is recycling: collecting water that has been used once, often by residents for excretion, clean it, and send it back for more use. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Not always, as Anthony King reports in NewScientist (17 September 2016, paywall): Excreted \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5541,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions\/5541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}