Prozac in British Drinking Water

[Eric J in MN]

A lot of people are being prescribed Prozac to treat depression and other illnesses.

These people on Prozac pee and flush, and the water is treated and recycled.

In Britain, traces of Prozac then wind up in drinking water, the British government's Environment Agency found.

They haven't determined quantities yet, and so the effect on human health and the environment is unknown.

I hope environmental agencies in both the US and Britain will monitor the quantities of popular pharmaceuticals in the water.

READ MORE AT MOVELEFT.COM

http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2004_08_09_prozac_in_british_drinking_water.asp

[kestrel91316]

1. Well, gee...............

Given that our drinking water is already contaminated with antibiotic residue, endocrine disrupters, arsenic, radioactive stuff, chromium, and oll sorts of healthy stuff, what's to worry????????

[Eric J in MN]

2. That's true. When I read the story, I didn't put it in that context. nt

nt

[NNadir]

3. This one's been popping up all over the place.

Actually many, if not most, prescription drugs show up in drinking water. Drugs that are known to do this include vitamins, antibiotics, anti-cancer compounds, etc.

The matter is covered among other places in Environ. Sci. Technol., 36 (6), 1202 -1211, 2002 "Pharmaceuticals, Hormones, and Other Organic Wastewater Contaminants in U.S. Streams, 1999-2000: A National Reconnaissance."

One of the more common contaminant drugs found widely in rivers and streams: Caffeine.

The authors of the article referenced here, of course, pick a controversial drug, Prozac, out of a hat, and imply that the citizens of Great Britian are being poisoned or having their minds controlled by evil pharmaceutical companies. In making this extraordinary claim, they rely on the general ignorance attending issues of chemical analysis. Modern LC/MS/MS devices aka Liquid Chromatography tandem mass spectrometers are quite capable of measuring concentrations of small organic molecules down to the picogram (pg) per ml quantities. One such molecule would be prozac. (A picogram is one trillionth of a gram.) A typical dose of prozac on the lower end is about 20 mg. Let us say that would could accurately detect 10 pg/ml, then we would find that there is two billionths of dose of prozac in a milliliter of drinking water, or one two millionths in a milliliter of water. To get a full dose, one would have to drink two million liters of water to get a dose of prozac. This is is two thousand cubic meters of water, which might be contained in a swimming pool that is 12.6 meters deep, 12.6 meters wide and 12.6 meters long, a good sized swimming pool's worth.

I hardly expect that many Britons drink so much water, and among those that do, they probably are in need of sedation.

[Eric J in MN]

5. Prozac in the water

I agree with you that we'll have to wait for them to determine the dosage to know if the Prozac is causing any harm to people or the environment.

If there are also traces of caffeine in drinking water, that doesn't change anything, however.

[LibLabUK]

4. Therapeutic and toxic dosages.

I doubt the levels of Prozac even come close to a effect-causing dosage.

I wonder what the methods of clearing the contamination would be... in contrast clearing biological and particulate contamination (filtration, sedimentation and chlorination) is a doddle.

I guess you could develop a bacterial strain that could metabolise the prozac.. if the concentration were high enough.

[LibLabUK]

6. Interesting article

Source - Guardian UK

Does your drinking water have Prozac in it?
It's unlikely. While all manner of drugs can be detected in sewage, and in rivers close to sewage outlets, processing the water appears to destroy any residual traces.
Media reports this week claimed that the Environment Agency had found significant levels of the antidepressant Prozac in drinking water, amounting to what some referred to as "mass medication". But the Environment Agency says it has never looked at Prozac. Instead, it attributes the work to Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP with a long-standing interest in the issue.

"There is no research that shows Prozac is in water. There's no analytical data at all," says Tony Lloyd, who runs the water research programme at the Drinking Water Inspectorate. The drug's chances of remaining intact through someone's body, the sewers and then the water treatment system, which is designed to break down persistent pesticides, are negligible, he says. "Prozac is a biodegradable molecule, and while you would expect people to be excreting it and you'd expect it to be in the sewers, you wouldn't expect it to get through sewage treatment."

The Drinking Water Inspectorate doesn't test water for all drugs, but it has looked at whether steroids used in contraceptive pills - considered among the most resilient of drugs - survive the water treatment process. Their equipment, which can detect one nanogramme of drug in a litre, found no traces in drinking water.