What's In Your Water? - Six Degrees of Lipitor

A couple of years back, I recall a conversation I had with a friend regarding the many cases of ovarian cysts among our female friends - with some of them requiring surgery.

'I tell you, there's something in the water!' he said...

Well it seems he was right. There really is something in the water. It may or may not be the actual cause of the above mentioned predicament, but then again no one knows at the moment how it affects us. So what is in your water?

It has been discovered that drug residues are increasingly being present in the water supplies in the US. How did it get there?

1) Flushing your unwanted medications in the toilet or emptying the syrups into your kitchen sink.

2) Peeing. What goes in must come out - and some drugs are excreted in the urine almost unchanged chemically, so its just like step 1.

3) Bathing and showering. Imagine lathering on steroid and antibiotic ointments during the day and then washing them off during a shower. Previously a lesser known contributing factor, a recent article is bringing awareness to this route of contamination.

A partial list of the drugs found include birth control pills, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, tranquilizers, antibacterials, antipsychotics, ACE inhibitors, nitroglycerin, steroids, ibuprofen and caffeine.

You may think 'Oh this doesn't affect me, since I have the latest water filtration gadget that costs a kajillion dollars at home and my family drinks exclusively from it.' Do remember that the meat you eat didn't have the luxury of drinking that water when it was still moving. Neither do the vegetables that go on your dinner plate, I doubt if anyone will use Diamond water for their livestock or crops.

So how has it affected us? The worrying thing is that no one can say for sure yet. More research will be needed before a definite conclusion can be drawn. It has however, created a new breed of Fishy-Gagas.

In the 1970s, scientists began detecting pharmaceutical residue in waterways, but in an era when rivers were choking on industrial sludge, traces of drugs seemed a small matter. It would take until the 1990s for that view to change. That was when pharmaceutical estrogens, principally from birth control pills, began showing up in the water too, leading to male fish with androgynous sex organs. Scarily, it did not take much estrogen to affect the fish — just 5 or 6 nanograms, or billionths of a gram, per liter of lake water

Sounds frightening eh? I'm not sure how stringent the testing of water quality is in Malaysia, but I'm guessing this will be a bigger issue in the future.