The Associated Press reports that pharmaceutical manufacturers dump different chemicals into our water resources, untreated, for myriad reasons, sometimes expired product and at times simply from cleaning their manufacturing equipment.
From the story:
U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.
Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.
Federal and industry officials say they don’t know the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers because no one tracks them — as drugs. But a close analysis of 20 years of federal records found that, in fact, the government unintentionally keeps data on a few, allowing a glimpse of the pharmaceuticals coming from factories.
The story states that the 271 million pounds they can account for is a massive undercount from what is actually released. Last September, we picked up a separate but similar Associated Press story that discussed largescale dumping by hospitals of hundreds of millions of pounds of drugs. But now, it turns out that the manufacturers themselves are also to blame.
Also from the story:
Both the EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey have studies under way comparing sewage at treatment plants that receive wastewater from drugmaking factories against sewage at treatment plants that do not.
Preliminary USGS results, slated for publication later this year, show that treated wastewater from sewage plants serving drug factories had significantly more medicine residues. Data from the EPA study show a disproportionate concentration in wastewater of an antibiotic that a major Michigan factory was producing at the time the samples were taken.
Meanwhile, other researchers recorded concentrations of codeine in the southern reaches of the Delaware River that were at least 10 times higher than the rest of the river.
What does this matter?
There is no way at this point for us to know for sure what effects of long-term exposure to low dosages of these drugs in our drinking water and food supplies might be. However, stories of six-legged frogs are not encouraging for how this might eventually affect humans.
Here’s a Green Point Negative for manufacturers (and end users) who abuse these chemical compounds and contribute to overall environmental toxicity.
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