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, an Associated Press investigation shows.
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.
But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.
I'll start by saying I'm no scientist and I generally dislike people with a thin grasp of science who over-apply what little they know. But here's what the world seems like to me: humans aren't going to evolve anymore. At least not according to the march of natural selection, that is. With the aid of fertility drugs and doctors, people who couldn't reproduce can now reproduce. At the same time, everything we're doing that seems designed to make us genetically weaker simultaneously makes our biggest enemies - little tiny bugs - stronger than we can know . . . until they start getting us, of course.
Does that make sense?
It's interesting what drugs come up in what cities. There's anti-anxiety meds in SoCal and sex hormones in SF. Oh dear. But it's the antibiotics that scare me. We're just making our germ-anic enemies stronger. Did you see War of the Worlds? If not, don't. If you want to see it, but haven't, stop reading. You know what gets the aliens and saves humans in that movie? A headcold. No joke. Superior alien firepower is no match for their ill-prepared immune systems. But we won't even have to leave the planet will we? We're going to make our killers ourselves. Tylenol by tylenol, whizz by whizz.
Not good.
P.S. Or maybe we're changing too, after all.
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