A Pharmacy In Your Tap Water?
While many know that there are bacteria and other compounds in their tap water, there is one thing that you wouldn't expect.
Dissolved pharmaceuticals can run through unfiltered and untreated in your water supply and could run all the way through to your tap.
Tiny amounts of pharmaceuticals (specifically antibiotics, hormones, steroids, mood stabilizers, and more) could make their way to your tap and infiltrate your drinking water. These dissolved pharmaceuticals get there from two main sources: People taking medication, absorbing most of it, and passing any non-absorbed medication through their urine or feces; and flushing unnecessary or old medication down toilets.
Though this water gets sent to water treatment plants, their filters have proven to be ineffective and cleansing water of these specific particulates. While water treatment experts insist that dissolved pharmaceuticals have no effect on people drinking their tap water, experts from private organizations and the government can’t say with certainty whether the level of drugs in drinking water are low enough to discount harmful health effects, especially when people are ingesting these medications through tap water for decades.
What Are The Risks?
With the story of pharmaceuticals in drinking water only coming about in 2000, there is no evidence of what the long-term risks of continuously drinking tap water would be. This means that scientists cannot speak in terms of known risks, but they plan to speak of a potential risk until they can address the issue from a more factual standpoint.
One thing that is agreed upon is that the problem is not going to naturally get better. To prove this claim, many point to two specific pieces of information. The first is that with people living longer, the aging demographic grows every year. This, coupled with an over-reliance in treating medical issues with pharmaceuticals, has led to more drugs being circulated among the general populace.
Homeowners:
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While there is no cut and dry solution to removing the pharmaceuticals from our water, scientists do agree that they need better strategies for how to treat public water supplies on a grand scale. One thing that you can do is get a Culligan Reverse Osmosis System. While charcoal filters can remove some pharmaceutical particulates, a reverse osmosis system will remove significantly more than that.