another thing to love about austin--clean water

I have a filter on my kitchen faucet at home and a filtered pitcher at work for my drinking water.

I have drunk local tap water after reading that the standards for bottled water are not as high as for municipal drinking water. But there is chlorine in the municipal water supply. Chlorine can kill probiotics in the gut. I worked hard to get my gut microflora balanced and don't want to jeopardize that. Filters do remove chlorine, so I began filtering my drinking water again.

I just read something in today's Statesman that was at first shocking, but on second thought, understandable. Many cities and towns in America have been found to have pharmaceuticals in their drinking water, including antibiotics, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones.

AP (Associated Press) did the study. That was also surprising. I didn't know AP did investigative research. (Back in the day, AP and UPI were the two sources of news sent "over the wire" to daily newspaper newsrooms around the world. I remember it coming in, seeing it being typed on yellow paper before my very eyes.)

I would have expected a study like this to come from Consumer Reports or the Environmental Working Group. Things change.

Anyway, they studied 50 major metropolitan areas. Austin was one of three with no pharmaceuticals in its water supply. Austin's water also had no herbicides. So yay! Here's another reason to love Austin. Clean water.

The water supplies of 41 million people are affected. Even though the dosage is far smaller than prescription strength, scientists are (rightly, in my opinion) concerned about the long-term effects. There are a lot of things happening, like the huge increase in autism, that there is no explanation for.

And if Austin's water had pharmaceuticals in it, filters would be useless. They don't screen for drugs. So those 41 million Americans are kind of helpless about this. I think they might be angry and demand action from elected officials. I am, and it doesn't even affect me.

How do pharmaceuticals get into the water supply? People take pills, and livestock growers give pharmaceuticals to chickens, cattle, pigs, etc. The body absorbs some, and the rest goes down the toilet (or out into the field, where rain washes it into surface water and aquifers).

Municipal wastewater is treated before being released (usually into rivers), and drinking water also gets treated before being sent through the pipes to our faucets. But treatments do not completely purify the water. They also don't screen for pharmaceuticals.

The reasons given for Austin's clean water is that our water supply comes from the Highland Lakes, and there are no major cities upstream.

Philadelphia had 56 pharmaceuticals in its water supply. Washington DC had 6. San Francisco (do I hear snickers?) had sex hormones in its water.

Tellingly, officials at several municipal or regional water providers told AP there were no pharmaceuticals in their supplies, but AP, through independent testing, found otherwise. So people are lying about this. And, get this. Some officials are refusing to release results because of post-9-11 concerns. With this news, I'm imagining terrorists laughing their asses off.

The article says, "...small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly, the kidney cells grew too slowly, and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation."

People drink a lot of water every day.

We are cautioned not to mix pharmaceuticals, to be sure our pharmacist and doctor know about every prescription we are taking, because they can negatively interact.

Well, who knows what kind of cocktails people are innocently consuming every time they go to the water fountain?

Think about that, and then do something. Demand change.