The Drugs You Get from Your Kitchen Faucet

February 18th, 2011. By Hunter West

The next time I look to buy fish—and I don’t care if it’s fresh or frozen—I’m gonna want to make sure the fish was happy before it met its ultimate end.

If that fish came from the St. Lawrence Seaway, there’s a good chance my intended dinner was, indeed happy. Probably high on Prozac.

Huh? Fish on Prozac? You’ve got to be kidding, you say. But no, the sad truth is that our fish and aquatic wildlife is on Prozac and lord knows what else from the stuff we put in the water. And we’re doing it to them…

Here’s the deal. A peer-reviewed study conducted by the Universite de Montreal together with Environment Canada and published last month in the journal Chemosphere found that fish swimming in the St. Lawrence Seaway were found to have copious amounts of antidepressants in their systems.

Most of the stuff was found in their liver. A lesser amount was found in their brains. Okay, so maybe they weren’t all that happy after all.

The least amount—and you’ll be happy to hear this—was found in muscle tissue which is typically the stuff we humans eat. UdeM professor Sebastien Sauve, a co-author of the study, said in comments published January 22^nd in the Montreal Gazette that he isn’t worried about consumers ingesting antidepressants through fish because the levels are so low in meat tissue. Thus, he says we have nothing to worry about.

Or do we?

North America is a drug-happy society with our moods, our pain—indeed our ability to have sex managed by a never-ending cocktail of drugs that go in our mouths, do their thing and then pass into the drug afterlife through our bowels and down the sewage pipe. All this residue goes into the water.

In Quebec alone, something like 555 million antidepressants are purchased each year. That works out to about one in four citizens popping at least a pill a day—and that doesn’t include the various drugs used for patients in psychiatric hospitals.

This is one province in a fairly sparsely populated country by world standards. Oh, and Sauve says that pharmaceutical residue in water is probably a global problem.

But that’s okay, because that stuff is treated before it gets into our water supply, right?

Well…

Lest you think that researchers just hauled fish out of the St, Lawrence Seaway at random, there was a bit more control to the study. The fish participating in the study were exposed to treated effluent from Montreal’s sewage treatment plant for a period of three months. Researchers then analyzed the fish.

The compelling aspect is not the distribution of drugs within the various hemispheres of the individual fish, but the fact that effluent used for purposes of the study was TREATED effluent.

Which means the residue from antidepressants, antibiotics, hormones and chemotherapy medicines are surviving the treatment processes and getting into the water.

Last time I checked, we get a lot of our drinking water from lakes and rivers. Treated water mind you, often chlorinated and benefitting from other processes to ensure the bad stuff is held at bay.

But the question remains, just how much of this nastiness survives treatment and gets all the way to our water glass?

It should be noted that Dr. Sauve maintains his real concern remains with the effect on the fish and ecosystems. Nonetheless, Sauve said that drugs such as chemotherapy drugs and the like pose a greater threat to humans than antidepressants.

If it were not possible for humans to come into contact with pharmaceutical effluent in their drinking water (or water used for recreation, or utility purposes like washing your car), then why would he say that?

Knock on wood; so far I don’t take anything save for the odd aspirin or ibuprofen for a headache. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m on a lot more drugs than I think I am, just by turning on the tap…

Tags: drugs in water, environmental contamination, Universite de Montreal, Water contamination, water supply

This was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2011 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Drugs/Medical, Pleading Ignorance . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.