Cotinine and Other Drugs in Drinking Water?

The Associated Press, after analyzing studies from various labs in various cities, reported that "a vast array of pharmaceuticals - including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones - have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans." And a vast array of Americans looked at their water taps in horror when they read the news. Another thing to worry about, in addition to phthlates in the shampoo, E. coli in the burgers, and politicians on the campaign trail.

Why are there drugs in the drinking water? There is no magic source of ever-pure water out there for municipal water supplies or water bottlers to use. It's something you probably don't like thinking about, but drinking water is recycled from sewers to taps and back, passed from city to city. Water flows out of your taps into your drains and the municipal sewage system. The sewage treatment plant cleans up the water to federal standards and dumps the ex-sewage into a lake or river. A municipal water supply plant further downstream pumps the water into their treatment plant, strains out the tadpoles, kills the known pathogens and pumps it to your water taps.

Most prominent among that vast array of detected drugs was cotinine, the result of smoking tobacco. People smoke, their bodies turn the nicotine into cotinine, the kidneys excrete the cotinine into the urine, the smoker pees, they flush, and the cotinine ends up in the municipal sewage plant from whence it goes into the muni water treatment plant and out the taps into your morning coffee. If the smokers would stop smoking, or stop peeing, we would not have cotinine in the water supply!

Should I switch to bottled water because it's safer? Be careful how you interpret this news: The report does not mention traces of drugs in bottled water, but only because they were not looking there. An interesting comparison would be to run the same tests on many brands of bottled water. Many bottlers just repackage municipal water.

What else is in tap water that we don't know about? Be careful what you look for: With a sensitive enough test, labs could probably find traces of dinosaur pee in our drinking water. No study has shown any harmful effects from trace levels of the drugs that have been found.

What is my personal paranoia level about drinking municipal tap water in the USA? It's low. It's almost as low as the level of cotinine and anti-depressants in the water I make my morning coffee with. I've lived and traveled in areas where there is no tap water: we hauled water from the creeks and boiled it before drinking it or cooking with it. I've lived and traveled in countries where they had taps, but drinking tap water could kill you with typhoid or cholera, or give you a nasty case of dysentery from parasites like Entamoeba hystolytica, Giardia lamblia, and their friends. We bought bottled water, or boiled the tap water before drinking it or cooking with it. American tap water is so safe that I even brush my teeth with it!

Looking at the top causes of death in the USA, the list is dominated by lifestyle diseases that you can do something about. Do the reasonable moderate things: don't smoke, don't drive drunk, wear a seatbelt while in a passenger vehicle, eat a reasonably balanced diet and exercise moderately. Get a cat. It's better than worrying about things you have no control over.