Originally published March 10 2008
Medication Pollution Spreads: Water Supply of 24 U.S. Cities Found Contaminated with Pharmaceuticals
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) Analysis of tap water supplies in major metropolitan areas conducted by the Associated Press has revealed that the water supply in 24 major U.S. cities -- serving over 40 million people -- are contaminated with trace amounts of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, anti-seizure medications, anti-inflammatory drugs, psychotropic drugs, pain medications and even caffeine. The upshot of the report is that tens of millions of Americans are unwittingly being subjected to a bizarre medical experiment with unpredictable results. No scientist can say for certain whether long-term exposure to micro doses of multiple pharmaceuticals is safe because such an experiment has never before been conducted on any population.
One of the most startling realizations of the study is that Americans are now using so many medications that their own biological waste products are becoming large-scale environmental pollutants. Yet neither the EPA nor drug companies have yet said anything useful about attempts to protect the environment from the chemical toxicities of pharmaceutical waste. Drug companies have so far pretended the problem doesn't exist. Their goal is to simply sell more drugs, and they seem to be entirely unconcerned about what happens after a typical medication consumer flushes the toilet and sends the toxic chemicals downstream.
If trace amounts of multiple pharmaceuticals are now in the tap water supplies, it also means that any use of tap water involves the further spread of those pharmaceutical chemicals. Watering your lawn, for example, means spraying small amounts of pharmaceuticals on your lawn. For ranchers, watering their cows, pigs or chickens also means dosing those animals with small amounts of pharmaceuticals, and for public schools in the affected cities, all the water fountains used by the children are now functioning as mass medication dispensing machines.
The most dangerous medical experiment in the history of our nation
The mass medication of America has now turned into a grand medical experiment that exposes infants, children, expectant mothers, senior citizens, voters, law enforcement officers, doctors and everybody else to a combination of drugs known to have extremely dangerous, mind-altering side effects when taken in full doses. And yet this mass medication of the population is being conducted with no doctor visits, no prescriptions, no consent and no medical assessment whatsoever. It is essentially a mandatory medication carpet-bombing of the entire population.
We can only guess what the results will be a generation from now. But clues can be gathered by watching the impact of such drugs on aquatic organisms. Amphibians exposed to very low doses of these types of chemicals, for example, begin to grow dual sex organs and suffer widespread infertility problems. Deformities in fish are being increasingly reported in rivers, and the world's oceans now have over a hundred "dead zones" where agricultural runoff and medication runoff have combined to form a toxic aquatic poison that kills all fish. This is the same water being used to create tap water in U.S. cities.
What's in recycled urine, anyway?
I remember hearing people snicker when they learned that NASA was recycling urine on the space shuttle and that astronauts would be drinking each other's recycled urine. Well guess what, folks? In major U.S. cities, almost everybody is drinking somebody else's recycled urine!
And guess what's in that urine? Toxic medications, caffeine, painkillers, and a cocktail of other chemicals like personal care product fragrances, pesticides and more. It's enough to make you sick. Literally.
Guess what else? This is the water used to make sodas and other beverages at local bottling plants. So every time you pick up a can of soda and drink it, not only are you getting the dangerous chemicals intentionally added to those sodas -- like aspartame and phosphoric acid -- you're also getting trace amounts of medication chemicals recycled from other peoples' urine, too! Yum!
Water treatment plants don't remove medication chemicals from the water!
Many consumers mistakenly believe that water treatment plants actually remove these contaminants, but that's not true. Municipal water treatment facilities do remove large solids (like dirt, sand and leaves), but they only sanitize the water by adding chlorine to kill microorganisms. They don't actually remove toxic chemicals from the water. Only distillation -- a highly energy-intensive process -- removes everything from the water (including the minerals).
A few cities treat their water with ozone, which is a far healthier method that avoids the use of toxic chlorine (which is linked to bladder cancer). Ozonation can break down some -- but not all -- medications. So what about countertop filters that use carbon blocks? I'm going to find out the answer to that question later this week when I interview Aquasana, the company that makes countertop filters and shower filters. I'll be sure to ask them for technical details about the ability of their filters to remove trace amounts of pharmaceuticals. That's suddenly an increasingly important question to consumers who don't want to consume toxic chemicals in their water.
Terrorists couldn't have done a better job of poisoning America
What's really interesting in all this is that the water supply is often cited as a security vulnerability to the nation; a weakness in the defense where terrorists could easily dump chemicals and poison the American people. But why would they bother? Drug companies have already poisoned the water supply for them!
And just in case the medication chemicals in the water aren't enough to poison the nation, many water treatment facilities add even more poison in the form of artificial fluoride chemicals that cause bone loss and weaken the immune system. Terrorists could hardly do a better job of poisoning the water supply than what corporate America has done already... with the help of criminally negligent government regulatory agencies, of course.
That brings us to the Environmental Protection Agency, a corrupt organization that has now sold out to big business. Read the following article to learn how the EPA now conspires with the chemical industry to censor scientists who try to protect the public from toxic chemicals: http://www.naturalnews.com/022773.html
The EPA has taken no action whatsoever to regulate or eliminate the presence of pharmaceutical chemicals in the water supply. Apparently, the EPA doesn't mind the fact that infants, babies and pregnant women are now drinking six different medications in their tap water. The agency remains either silent on the issue or in agreement with the corrupt scientists who say the levels of contamination are too low to really matter. But in truth, nobody knows the health effects of combining multiple low-dose pharmaceuticals and feeding it to the population. Anybody who says there's no risk of harm is simply lying.
How to avoid contaminated water
The solution to all this? On a personal level, you'll need to avoid drinking tap water, period. Or filter it really well. Distillation, as I mentioned, is very energy intensive (which makes it bad for global warming), but it does get the water very, very clean. Other consumer-level water filters may remove some amount of pharmaceuticals, but I don't have all the facts on that yet, so I'm not going to make any recommendations until I learn more.
But I am researching it, so stay tuned to NaturalNews.com and subscribe to our e-mail newsletter at http://www.naturalnews.com/readerregistratio...
I'll be sure to e-mail an announcement when I have new information about the effectiveness of consumer water filters.
Get your medications for free!
The funny part in all this is that if medication trends continue and the presence of pharmaceuticals in the water supply continues to increase, it might get to the point where you no longer need to pay for medications at all! Need some anti-inflammatory drugs? Just drink the water!
Of course, it might be better described as "drinking Big Pharma's kool-aid," because the pharmaceutical industry is now founded on a cult-like belief in chemicals promoted by commissioned drug reps, psychiatric zealots and mind-numbed doctors. The level of irrational belief in the power of pharmaceuticals has reached such a fervor that it can only have been made possible by a mass brainwashing of gullible professionals. They have schools dedicated to this dark art -- they're called "med schools."
Seriously, this tap water contamination is yet one more reason to consider leaving the city and moving closer to nature. America is now so intoxicated with medications that they're showing up in the water! Do you realize how many people have to be taking (and flushing) drugs to get to that point? It means that the nation has become a chemical consumption quagmire that has now poisoned the people, the land, the air and the water.
The people of America deserve better. Problem is, they're too drugged up to know it! Don't you find it interesting, by the way, that the EPA is warning everybody about the environmental dangers of colloidal silver, yet utterly ignoring the environmental dangers of pharmaceutical antibiotics? It's an interesting double standard...
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