Do Not Flush! The Prescription Potty
Expired medication? Prescription pills?
WAIT! DON’T FLUSH ‘EM!!
READ THIS FIRST!
Again ANOTHER reason why not to rely on prescriptions drugs and to seek alternative therapies! Our bodies are 70% water–this contaminated water makes it way back into our systems through our faucets and ground supply that feeds our crops which we later eat and purchase at the local food store.
QUICK GET: No prescription drugs; no dumping drugs down the toilet; buy local food, buy organic.
With our nation’s dependence on prescription drugs for pain and bodily “dis”eases on the rise our water ways are becoming contaminated waterfalls of prescription drugs. Using highly sensitive assays, the U.S. Geological Survey found traces of 82 different organic contaminants — fertilizers and flame retardants as well as pharmaceuticals — in surface waters across the nation. These drugs included natural and synthetic hormones, antibiotics, antihypertensives, painkillers, and antidepressants.
Marc Taylor, like many health-care professionals, thinks a good first step for getting drugs out of waterways is to persuade hospitals and nursing homes to abandon their policy of flushing unused drugs down the toilet. A handful of states and municipalities have launched pharmaceutical take-back programs, in which consumers bring unwanted or expired medications to an official collection site. Drugs are then either returned to manufacturers or disposed of by incineration.
Here’s info on one city already making a difference. This program allows residents of San Rafael, California the opportunity to take charge of their health by offering places to “Recycle Your Pharmaceutical Drugs.”
Flushing is the main pathway by which pharmaceuticals enter the environment. Hospitals and nursing homes routinely dump unused or expired pills down the toilet, and consumers have been advised to do the same; effluent from pharmaceutical manufacturers also ends up at municipal wastewater treatment plants.
When residents of Heritage Village and two other nearby retirement communities flush their toilets, wastewater laced with traces of prescription drugs rushes through a series of pipes into the Heritage Village treatment plant. This flushing is the main pathway by which pharmaceuticals enter the environment. Hospitals and nursing homes routinely dump unused or expired pills down the toilet, and consumers have been advised to do the same; effluent from pharmaceutical manufacturers also ends up at municipal wastewater treatment plants.
The effect of those drugs on the environment, and possibly on those who drink water pumped from those streams, is only beginning to be understood.
Our rivers — already stressed by pollutants, groundwater pumping, reduced flows, and overburdened wastewater treatment plants that dump raw sewage — will be ever less able to cope.
In Boulder Creek, David Norris, an environmental endocrinologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found that female white suckers, bottom-feeding fish that grow up to a foot long, outnumber males by more than five to one, and that 50 percent of males have female sex tissue. Similar intersex changes have been found in flat-head chubs and smallmouth bass. The cause, Norris suspects, is exposure to estrogen. Like most pharmaceuticals, hormones aren’t designed to break down easily. They’re supposed to have an effect at low dosages with chronic use, and they only partly dissolve in water.
“I’m worried for fish populations, and I’m worried for human populations,” says Norris. “The levels found in Boulder Creek are low in absolute terms, but they aren’t low on the biological level. You could have six chemicals below the no-effect level, but all together they are above the no-effect level.” In lab tests, frogs and rats have developed infections and deformities after being exposed to multiple pollutants at extremely low levels. Since exposure to only one compound is rare in the modern world, sorting out “mixture effects” is a daunting but critical research area. The estrogenic compounds in drinking water, Norris says, are “adding to the general exposure of the human population to environmental estrogens in our foods, and in containers that hold our foods. They all work through the same mechanisms.” In the United Kingdom, hormones in the environment have been linked with lowered sperm counts and gynecomastia — the development of breasts in men.