Janese Johnson

The Associated Press recently spent five months researching and testing water throughout the United States. Not only are The AP’s findings shocking, but also the response from Benjamin H. Grumbles, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator for water, is just as troubling.

\What The AP found in its tests was that the drinking water in 24 major metropolitan cities throughout the U.S contains a mixture of pharmaceuticals ranging from antibiotics and anti-convulsants to mood stabilizers and sex hormones.

Of course, the utilities say that their water is safe for drinking, and Grumbles told The AP the agency recognizes that this contamination in water supplies is a growing concern and that government has some catching up to do: “Our position is there needs to be more searching, more analysis.”

Even though there seems to be at least a little concern from the EPA, the government has not established any safety limits for pharmaceutical drugs in drinking water, as it has for many other chemicals; the agency is just learning how to detect low concentrations of drugs in water, let alone assess the risk posed by them.

Francesco Pomati is a poisons expert and biologist who was seriously troubled by drugs discovered in European waters. He conducted an experiment that exposed developing human kidney cells to a mixture of 13 drugs at levels mimicking those found in Italian rivers. His research is continuing to reveal that, over a period of time, ingesting small amounts of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water can harm humans.

In another recent published study, Pomati discovered that some of those pharmaceuticals could amplify, or reverse, the effects of some others. For example, the cholesterol drug bezafibrate and the asthma drug salbutamol individually seem to stimulate cell growth. Combined in the laboratory, however, they slowed it way down. The same cholesterol drug appeared to make cells more sensitive to harm from the antibiotic fluoroquinolone.

Other researchers are finding similar results to Pomati’s. One study reveals human breast-cancer cells grew twice as fast when exposed to estrogens taken from catfish caught near untreated sewage overflows in Pennsylvania, compared with other fish.

 Sandra Steingraber, a biologist at New York’s Ithaca College, adds that many efforts to determine how trace drugs affect humans don’t fully consider the whole range of pharmaceuticals in the environment and whether someone has been exposed at more-susceptible times, such as during childhood or old age.

“The timing makes the poison as much as the dose,” she said. “And the dose itself is not the dose from just any one thing — it’s from this whole kaleidoscope of chemicals.”

Even though the drug industry claims that it has done its own research on the safety of toxicity levels of drugs, its studies have used only individual drugs or combinations on live animals to study toxicity levels for human consumption. Scientists say that this is very different than long-term consumption of water drunk by humans with a combination of drugs in it.

The EPA says it needs more research, yet there is very valuable research that has already been done that reveals that 41 million Americans are drinking water throughout the U.S. that is very likely harmful for their health and well being.

It seems quite critical that we have safe drinking water. Without pressure from us for water utilities to test for pharmaceuticals in the water, and remove them if they are there, then the ignorant insistence that this is not hurting anyone will continue.

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Janese Johnson has been doing intuitive counseling nationally for more than 20 years. She may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .