Although it has gone through a process of sanitation, the drinking water we consume contains many micro-doses of various kinds of drugs. If the doses are minute, their combinations worry scientists for our long-term health.
Antibiotics, antidepressants and other types of drugs, here is what we are likely to find if we analyze our glasses of drinking water, in tiny doses. How do they get into our glasses of drinking water? Simply when medicines are flushed down the toilet and then gulped down when the toilet is flushed, or even sometimes when we digest them after consumption.
It was researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who made this discovery, which they publish in the journal ACS Publications. It was in fields irrigated by purified water that they succeeded in identifying drug residues, more particularly a drug used for the treatment of epilepsy. The team of researchers then offered cucumbers and lettuce containing the remains of these substances to volunteers, and they showed an increase in the level of the drug in their urine for at least a week.
If the doses are very small, at levels 100,000 times lower than a 400 milligram pill, they are unlikely to present any danger to our health. But what worries scientists are the combinations between these drug doses, which could potentially create a harmful cocktail. » Individually, these drugs are approved, but it has not been studied what this means when taken in the same soup. explains Mae Wu of the US Natural Resources Defense Council.
What about the impact of the consumption of these micro-doses of drugs on the long term for our health. » It’s unclear what it means to take multiple medications in very low doses for a lifetime explains researcher Klaus Kümmerer from the University of Lüneburg in Germany.
Source: newscientist, motherjones