From: Nicky Molloy 
Subject: SNET: Drugs found in tap water
Date: 11 Nov 2000 21:08:56 -0500
To: SNET ,
        Armageddon or New Age? 

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http://www.usatoday.com/life/health/general/lhgen115.htm
 Drugs found in tap water
Teen finds antibiotics in public supplies
By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY

High school student Ashley Mulroy was reading a science magazine two years
ago when she learned that European scientists had made a
disturbing discovery: Drugs of all kinds, including antibiotics, were
flowing in rivers, streams, groundwater and even in tap water.

That began a science project in which the 17-year-old searched for and found
antibiotics in the Ohio River. She also found those
drugs in the drinking water in her hometown of Wheeling, W.Va. She is one of
the first in the USA to look for such drugs in the
nation's drinking water supply.

Mulroy's work recently won the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, an
international science competition sponsored by ITT Industries. More
important, her study highlights an emerging scientific issue with alarming
implications.

Some experts fear that even low levels of antibiotics fouling the nation's
water supply may help create superbugs: microorganisms
that have evolved to survive an antibiotic's lethal assault.

Public health experts already have noted the rise of infection after
infection that cannot be stopped with the usual arsenal of
antibiotics.

And the superbugs may be causing "tens of thousands" of deaths in the USA
each year, says Abigail Salyers, an expert on antibiotic
resistance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Consider these reports:

 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers have found antibiotics in
North Carolina's Neuse River, a source of drinking
water.

 Another EPA chemist reports finding several drugs, including a common
antibiotic, in river water outside a southern U.S. city.

 Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have found antibiotics in many
water samples taken from streams across the nation.

These findings "raise a big red flag," says Stuart Levy at Tufts University
in Boston. The antibiotics aren't harmful on their own.
Rather, Levy and others worry that waters laced with these drugs could breed
bugs that can shrug off the killing effects of the
wonder drugs, such as penicillin.

Mulroy's science project got started after she read "Drugged Waters," a 1998
article in Science News that gave a chilling account of
the drugs, including antibiotics, floating in European waters.

"I remember thinking the story had really bad implications," Mulroy says. So
she decided to test for antibiotics in the Ohio River
near her home.

Over a 10-week period, Mulroy and her mom got into the family car and drove
for miles to test sites along the Ohio River.

In the end, she got her river water samples back to the Linsly School, a
private school that she attended in Wheeling . She looked
for three common antibiotics: penicillin, tetracycline and vancomycin. She
found all three drugs in low concentrations (parts per
trillion) in the Ohio River. Water samples taken from sites near livestock
or dairy farms had the highest concentrations of
antibiotics, Mulroy says.

Large farming operations in the USA often keep hogs, chickens and other
animals in crowded, dirty pens and rely on low doses of
antibiotics to keep diseases at bay. Antibiotics also are given to healthy
animals to fatten them for market.

Scientists know that antibiotics given to animals (or to humans) don't get
fully metabolized in the digestive system and end up
being excreted. In a farming operation, that waste can make it into the
runoff or groundwater, which eventually makes it into a
nearby stream, and in this case, the Ohio River.

River samples taken near local hospitals also revealed antibiotics, albeit
at slightly lower concentrations, Mulroy says.
Antibiotics may leach into the groundwater around hospitals if cases or
bottles of expired drugs are dumped into a landfill, she
says.

Do such drugs get into water flowing out of the kitchen tap? Mulroy's study
suggests that they do.

Mulroy also took samples of water from three taps in Wheeling, Moundsville
and Procter. All three, including water from the drinking
fountain at her school, were contaminated with the antibiotics in question.
The concentrations were less than those found in the
river water, she says.

Water flowing from the Wheeling tap comes from a municipal water-treatment
facility that relies on sand filtration to clean the
water. That method, the primary method of water treatment in the USA,
doesn't remove antibiotics or other drugs from the water.

The other two samples of public water came from wells. The fact that they
also had antibiotics suggests that groundwater is
contaminated, Mulroy says.

However, Mulroy's study also suggests a potential fix for waters laced with
drugs such as antibiotics. She says that an activated
charcoal filtration system removed most of the antibiotics in the tap water.

Agricultural effect

The USA produces more than 50 million pounds of antibiotics each year.
Experts estimate that 60% are used to treat humans. The other
40% go to farming operations.

New research suggests that the latter doesn't stay on the farm.

Joseph Bumgarner at the EPA, Michael Meyer at the U.S. Geological Survey and
their colleagues have identified antibiotic
contamination of surface water near two North Carolina hog farms. Such
farms, which often keep 50,000 animals in close quarters,
create huge pools of manure called "lagoons."

These hogs routinely receive doses of antibiotics, including
chlortetracycline, lincomycin and sulfamethiazine. Sure enough, the
team found those three antibiotics in the lagoons and in samples from nearby
streams, which empty into the Neuse River.

The river water samples also contained the antibiotics, Bumgarner says. The
Neuse River supplies the Raleigh-Durham area with its
public water. The researchers have yet to test the tap water there.

The team did find an antibiotic flowing from a tap on one of the hog farms.
That tap drew its water from a well, a finding that
suggests groundwater is laced with the drugs, Meyer says.

Preliminary results from this study also suggest that bacteria in the
streams have acquired resistance to common antibiotics,
Bumgarner says.

Studies on a hog farm in Iowa and a chicken farm in Ohio produced similar
results, Meyer says. Some experts, including Karen Florini
of the Environmental Defense in Washington, D.C., are urging the Food and
Drug Administration to ban the use of antibiotics to speed
the growth of farm animals.

Recently, the FDA took a step in that direction by announcing its intent to
ban two antibiotics used by poultry farmers. Florini's
group and others also are calling on EPA to control the pollution in runoff
from factory-farming operations. But EPA's Bumgarner
says the agency doesn't have enough information to take such a step.

Worrisome findings

Human waste also contains antibiotics, and instead of going into a lagoon,
it gets flushed down the toilet. EPA chemist Tammy
Jones-Lepp wanted to find out whether the antibiotics in sewage would
survive a wastewater-treatment facility.

Jones-Lepp collected water downstream from two such facilities in an unnamed
southern city. She found that the treated river water
contained low levels of azithromycin, an antibiotic often prescribed to
children for ear infections.

The results suggest that treatment plants, although they filter out some
contaminants, don't remove all traces of drugs such as
antibiotics.

Effects still unknown

"It's clear antibiotics get into the environment," says Tamar Barlam,
director of the Antibiotic Resistance Project at the Center
for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C. But scientists have
yet to determine the impact of such contamination on
human health, especially when the antibiotics, and other drugs, are present
at minute levels, she says.

David Bell at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says
there's not enough scientific data to say that
environmental contamination plays a big role in generating antibiotic
resistance.

Far more important, he says, is the fact that humans have abused antibiotics
by taking them unnecessarily.


The overuse of antibiotics by the agricultural industry also plays a big
role in creating superbugs, Bell says.

Farmers who feed healthy animals a steady stream of antibiotics can set the
stage for human illness in this way: Bacteria in the
digestive system of the animal can develop resistance to antibiotics. Humans
who then eat undercooked meat from the infected animal
can suffer an infection - one that can't be treated with that antibiotic,
Bell says.

Levy and others would argue that environmental contamination might pose a
more serious problem than previously recognized. Levy says
those relatively harmless bugs, like the E. coli in Mulroy's study, can
develop genetic traits to repel antibiotics. Once they have
that genetic ammunition, they can trade the information to other bugs
relatively easily, he says.

That means that a bug that doesn't cause human disease could pass along its
genetic trick to a bug that does. The result, Levy
worries, would be a bacterium that has evolved the capability to do an
end-run around the most powerful drugs of the modern century.

The USA lags about a decade behind researchers in Europe who have found
antibiotics and many other drugs in the waters there.
Indeed, Mulroy's study is one of the first to look at the public water
supply in the USA.

Although other scientists must confirm her study, Mulroy has contributed
something important to the field.

"This really is a testimony to our kids," Levy says.

For information on the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, see the Web site of the
Water Environment Federation:

http://www.wef.org/publicinfo/stockholm/index.jhtml
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