Trace amount of drugs in water alarms Philadelphia residents

Alarmed residents flooded the Philadelphia Water Department with calls yesterday after the Associated Press reported that traces of 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts had been found in city drinking water - but department spokesman Ed Grusheski said there is nothing to worry about.

"In order to get one child's dose of acetaminophen [Tylenol's active ingredient], you'd have to drink eight glasses of Philadelphia water a day for 11,000 years," Grusheski said.

"You'd have to drink 8 glasses of water a day for 800 years to get the amount of caffeine you'd get in one cup of coffee.

"I mean, these are truly trace amounts. Right now, our water is safe and healthy."

Grusheski explained the huge differences in test results between Philadelphia's 56 pharmaceutical traces, Washington, D.C.'s five and San Francisco's one.

The AP, he said, which reported traces of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water of 41 million Americans, relied on testing by the drinking-water providers, which ranged from no testing (New York City) to testing for a few pharmaceuticals to Philadelphia's most extensive testing.

"Philadelphia had the largest number because we're looking for the largest number of pharmaceuticals," Grusheski said.

"If you look for them in parts per billion, as some cities did, you don't see them all. We look at them in parts per trillion. So we found a lot more."

Grusheski said that unlike many European countries, which have "drug take-back" programs for unused pharmaceuticals, Americans tend to flush them.

"I'm at an age where I'm taking seven medications every morning," he said. "Maybe 20 percent of those pharmaceuticals are absorbed by my body. The rest goes through and is excreted.

"When my mother died, I was advised by the nurse to flush her pain medications down the toilet."

Trace elements of those medications will end up in the drinking water, he said, because wastewater plants treat water for harmful micro-organisms, not pharmaceutical traces, before returning it to rivers or lakes, where it eventually ends up flowing from the kitchen tap again.

Grusheski said that European countries have drug take-back programs that encourage people to return unused drugs rather them flush them back into the water system again.

"I don't think it's clear what the major source of this pharmaceutical material [in drinking water] might be," said Dr. Charles Haas, Drexel University professor of environmental engineering.

"Is it people taking drugs and excreting, or is it disposal of drugs into the water system by hospitals, nursing homes, prison pharmacies or university labs - which are essentially uncontrolled environments?

"We really don't have a sense of whether there is a dominant player or not."

Either way, Haas said, "parts per billion or per trillion are very tiny quantities of this material, and there is zero evidence that these levels pose a human health risk."

Philadelphia, he said, gets its drinking water from two treatment plants on the Schuylkill and one on the Delaware River.

"These plants are designed to take out infectious microorganisms," not pharmaceutical traces.

"We've got one of the best water departments in the country," Haas said. "I drink their tap water. I've got three animals that drink their tap water. There is no need, based on this report, for people to start using bottled water.

"Besides," Haas said, "there are major labels of bottled water that use tap water. So if it was tested as carefully as Philadelphia drinking water, what would we find?"*