Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

AMY GOODMAN: Saturday was World Water Day, and the United Nations estimates close to 1.5 billion people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water. What about here in the United States?

Anti-epileptics were found in the drinking water of Southern California; a sex hormone was found in San Francisco’s water; three medications and an antibiotic were found in the water supply of Tucson, Arizona; and a mood stabilizer was found in the water of New Jersey. And that’s just to name a few.

The Associated Press has conducted an extensive investigation into the drinking water in at least twenty-four major American cities across the country, which contain trace amounts of a wide array of pharmaceuticals. The amounts might be small, but scientists are worried about the long-term health and environmental consequences of their presence in the water supplies of some forty-one million Americans.

The five-month investigation of sixty-two metropolitan areas and fifty-one smaller cities found that many drinking water suppliers, including bottled water companies, do not even test for the presence of drugs in the water. The utilities that do test for drugs often don’t tell customers about the trace amounts of medications in their water.

AMY GOODMAN: In one of the pieces in the AP investigation, “No Standards to Test for Drugs in Water,” it’s written, “Congress held hearings in 2006 on endocrine-disrupting compounds after researchers discovered that the Potomac River, dotted with sewage treatment plants, contains feminized male bass which create egg yolk proteins, a process usually restricted to females. But the hearings produced no new proposals.”

Anti-epileptics were found in the drinking water of Southern California