8 ms·

Shouldn't we be placing the blame on people flushing meds down the toilet? Or are they leeching from peoples urine and waste?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 5y ago
It is in the urine. Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's Pandora's box. A parallel question is whether the body of a deceased patient should be treated as hazardous. We do tend to bury or cremate them without a thought towards whether these drugs will survive and impact the local environment.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Get sick. Get put on a crap ton of medications. You found out that most have all sorts of crazy effects on the body. Ones not listed as side effects, or very rare, or even common but doctor has never heard of. Or your fun ones where 2 conflict in crazy ways. Poor fish downstream don’t stand a chance.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's pandora's box. So here's the bit that I don't get. When my friend had to get her cat a medical scan, the cat had to have radiactive contrast ingested/injected. She was then told to carefully, without touching it, collect all poop made by the cat in the next 7 days, put it in this special container, then bring it back to the vet for safe disposal. However, when humans have the same procedure done....no one cares? You drink radioactive contrast, then pee and poop as normal, it all goes down our drains. How does that make any sense?
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    It’s the same reason radiology technicians leave the room before imaging a patient. You want to reduce exposure to unnecessary radiation.
  - mh- 5y ago
    Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Or at least their caregivers assume they don't.
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
      > Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Well.. not usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan
      - LinuxBender 5y ago
        Also composting toilets.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Correct. We poop into a pipe that takes it to a wastewater treatment facility where government employees handle it.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Do wastewater plants use Geiger counters/data loggers on waste streams?
        nick__m 5y ago
        I don't think that there is a need for monitoring since radiotracer usually have a short halflife, they usually use fluoride-18 (half life 110min) to replace a -OH or a well placed -H in a molecule that bind to the site of interest (ex: glucose -> fluorodeoxyglucose, levodopa -> fluorodopa).
- triceratops 5y ago
  > The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. I thought that was common for patients on chemotherapy drugs? I remember seeing some sign in a hospital room's bathroom about it, but the details escape me.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    Yes, but, this is sort of "priced in" so although your waste is measurably radioactive it enters the same stream.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. Not even drugs necessarily. The theory is out there that a hidden but significant influence on society is large-scale male consumption of estrogen via contamination from women's urine.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    It's not a theory, it's a debunked hypothesis. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...
    - andai 5y ago
      > Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation's drinking water supplies > Some research cited in the report suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of estrogens in the environment. Other research estimates that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise 15 percent of the estrogens in the world's water supply.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        There are two rather distinct questions: 1. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from birth control pills? 2. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from women's urine? (There are other similar questions, of course.) These two questions are related in that #1 is mostly a subset of #2. But concluding that #1 is an insignificant source of estrogen doesn't tell you much about #2. Women produce estrogen on their own.
    - tristor 5y ago
      It appears that article say the source being urine waste of women taking birth control pills is debunked, it says nothing about the long-term health impacts of drinking water being contaminated with estrogen or what the sources of the other 99% of estrogens found in drinking water are. So while the causal link may be false, the underlying claim is still a concern. It's actually a massive problem in the West, especially the US, that the average person is exposed to tons of endocrine disruptors in the food and water supply, everything from estrogens in the water to plasticizers in your food wrappings on your take out or in the store.
- stainforth 5y ago
  What does a libertarian have to say about market players preventing normal functioning of the market by restricting knowledge like actively resisting studies on products?
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    Don't like it? Move where there isn't radioactive water. /s
rootusrootus 5y ago
Even if that was true, why should we shift the blame away from an entity with plausible ability to solve it, and towards the great mass of people who are impossible to hold accountable?
- post_break 5y ago
  So you're saying if it were coming from people throwing meds down the toilet, we should blame the drug makers? Is that what you're saying or am I misunderstanding?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > we should blame the drug makers? No, of course not. What I am saying is that our best shot at getting pharmaceuticals out of fresh water is better sewer & water treatment. We can control that. It is implausible to control people who are, within the privacy of their bathroom, chucking random things down the toilet. The only thing that would stop that behavior is immediate consequences to them personally. Edit: And this assumes it is all people chucking drugs down the toilet. If it's coming through their urine, then we're definitely back to water treatment being the only plausible answer.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "entity with plausible ability to solve it" I didn't see a mention of an overall solution in the article. I see they mention that leaky pipes could be the cause for that stream. Is there evidence to suggest that the sewage treatment facility actually removes these chemicals?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    A quick google search suggests that a typical basic sewage treatment plant doesn't do a great job of removing pharmaceuticals. But we already do have some plants which are pretty good at it. So this isn't even really an engineering problem at this point, it's a political(funding) problem.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
"You killed him." "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." - Collateral (2004 film)
moate 5y ago
Part of the idea of wastewater treatment plants is to address things like chemicals in wastewater. If the pipes on the way leak the tainted water, it can't be treated. Of course there are also "forever chemicals" that we can't neutralize, but we have no hope of dealing with chemically tainted water that never gets to the locations capable of addressing it.
- treeman79 5y ago
  So we should all pee in bottles and ship them to waste water plant. Perhaps we could build some sort of hyper loop to send them in bulk to speed up the process. Diagram of the idea, reversed https://xkcd.com/1599/ https://xkcd.com/1599/
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    No, we should pay the taxes or user fees needed to maintain our infrastructure in a state of good repair.
    - h_anna_h 5y ago
      Sadly it's not the taxpayer that decides where the money goes. Getting new military airplanes, putting them in their own pockets, and bribing the media with it seems to be preferable for politicians.
      - jdavis703 5y ago
        The federal government doesn’t maintain sewer lines anywhere in the US except maybe on military bases and the like. At least in California we have special tax districts that are managed by a voter-elected board. The voters literally get to decide on infrastructure spending, at least in California.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Okay perhaps this joke was to subtle for the crowd here.
flatline 5y ago
A bigger question in my mind is whether this is a real problem, or ever could be with higher concentrations likely to occur in this way. Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer than having any, but what amount of what specific chemicals is likely to have a downstream effect? This poses a much broader question about low dosage toxicity for any number of chemicals in fresh water, ranging from agricultural run-off to industrial waste and spillage. Hard to study.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer Except for fluoride and chlorine. Small amounts of those chemicals in water are a net health benefit. Society has to be careful about adding anything, but 100% pure water isn't the healthiest choice no matter what the commercials say. Also iodine in salt.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    It's possible water without chlorine is beneficial too. Doesn't Paris use ozone and/or UVC instead? I also wonder about fluoride's benefits if we use toothpaste and mouthwash that has it. For example, I know people on well water or city water without it that don't have teeth issues.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Paris still uses chlorine. It may also use UV but nothing kills bacteria as effectively and constantly as bleach. In a large population with lots of ancient pipes not using chlorine would be very dangerous.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        I wonder where I heard that, or if it's a different city. Also, they are generally using chloramine, not sodium hypochlorite.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Do you want to go and stage some awareness campaign to tell people not to flush their meds and hope they don't, or would you rather we be proactive about the reality we're in and do something about it now?
- giantg2 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who flushes their meds. Is this really a big issue? I thought it's mostly waste based sources.
- post_break 5y ago
  I have seen many news reports of free medication drops offs and asking people not to flush them. Does that answer your condescending question?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 5y ago

It is in the urine. Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's Pandora's box. A parallel question is whether the body of a deceased patient should be treated as hazardous. We do tend to bury or cremate them without a thought towards whether these drugs will survive and impact the local environment.

treeman79 5y ago
Get sick. Get put on a crap ton of medications. You found out that most have all sorts of crazy effects on the body. Ones not listed as side effects, or very rare, or even common but doctor has never heard of. Or your fun ones where 2 conflict in crazy ways. Poor fish downstream don’t stand a chance.
gambiting 5y ago
>> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's pandora's box. So here's the bit that I don't get. When my friend had to get her cat a medical scan, the cat had to have radiactive contrast ingested/injected. She was then told to carefully, without touching it, collect all poop made by the cat in the next 7 days, put it in this special container, then bring it back to the vet for safe disposal. However, when humans have the same procedure done....no one cares? You drink radioactive contrast, then pee and poop as normal, it all goes down our drains. How does that make any sense?
- jdavis703 5y ago
  It’s the same reason radiology technicians leave the room before imaging a patient. You want to reduce exposure to unnecessary radiation.
- mh- 5y ago
  Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Or at least their caregivers assume they don't.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    > Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Well.. not usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan
    - LinuxBender 5y ago
      Also composting toilets.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Correct. We poop into a pipe that takes it to a wastewater treatment facility where government employees handle it.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Do wastewater plants use Geiger counters/data loggers on waste streams?
      - nick__m 5y ago
        I don't think that there is a need for monitoring since radiotracer usually have a short halflife, they usually use fluoride-18 (half life 110min) to replace a -OH or a well placed -H in a molecule that bind to the site of interest (ex: glucose -> fluorodeoxyglucose, levodopa -> fluorodopa).
triceratops 5y ago
> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. I thought that was common for patients on chemotherapy drugs? I remember seeing some sign in a hospital room's bathroom about it, but the details escape me.
- freeone3000 5y ago
  Yes, but, this is sort of "priced in" so although your waste is measurably radioactive it enters the same stream.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. Not even drugs necessarily. The theory is out there that a hidden but significant influence on society is large-scale male consumption of estrogen via contamination from women's urine.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  It's not a theory, it's a debunked hypothesis. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...
  - andai 5y ago
    > Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation's drinking water supplies > Some research cited in the report suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of estrogens in the environment. Other research estimates that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise 15 percent of the estrogens in the world's water supply.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      There are two rather distinct questions: 1. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from birth control pills? 2. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from women's urine? (There are other similar questions, of course.) These two questions are related in that #1 is mostly a subset of #2. But concluding that #1 is an insignificant source of estrogen doesn't tell you much about #2. Women produce estrogen on their own.
  - tristor 5y ago
    It appears that article say the source being urine waste of women taking birth control pills is debunked, it says nothing about the long-term health impacts of drinking water being contaminated with estrogen or what the sources of the other 99% of estrogens found in drinking water are. So while the causal link may be false, the underlying claim is still a concern. It's actually a massive problem in the West, especially the US, that the average person is exposed to tons of endocrine disruptors in the food and water supply, everything from estrogens in the water to plasticizers in your food wrappings on your take out or in the store.
stainforth 5y ago
What does a libertarian have to say about market players preventing normal functioning of the market by restricting knowledge like actively resisting studies on products?
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  Don't like it? Move where there isn't radioactive water. /s

rootusrootus 5y ago

Even if that was true, why should we shift the blame away from an entity with plausible ability to solve it, and towards the great mass of people who are impossible to hold accountable?

post_break 5y ago
So you're saying if it were coming from people throwing meds down the toilet, we should blame the drug makers? Is that what you're saying or am I misunderstanding?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > we should blame the drug makers? No, of course not. What I am saying is that our best shot at getting pharmaceuticals out of fresh water is better sewer & water treatment. We can control that. It is implausible to control people who are, within the privacy of their bathroom, chucking random things down the toilet. The only thing that would stop that behavior is immediate consequences to them personally. Edit: And this assumes it is all people chucking drugs down the toilet. If it's coming through their urine, then we're definitely back to water treatment being the only plausible answer.
giantg2 5y ago
"entity with plausible ability to solve it" I didn't see a mention of an overall solution in the article. I see they mention that leaky pipes could be the cause for that stream. Is there evidence to suggest that the sewage treatment facility actually removes these chemicals?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  A quick google search suggests that a typical basic sewage treatment plant doesn't do a great job of removing pharmaceuticals. But we already do have some plants which are pretty good at it. So this isn't even really an engineering problem at this point, it's a political(funding) problem.

ceilingcorner 5y ago

"You killed him." "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." - Collateral (2004 film)

moate 5y ago

Part of the idea of wastewater treatment plants is to address things like chemicals in wastewater. If the pipes on the way leak the tainted water, it can't be treated. Of course there are also "forever chemicals" that we can't neutralize, but we have no hope of dealing with chemically tainted water that never gets to the locations capable of addressing it.

treeman79 5y ago
So we should all pee in bottles and ship them to waste water plant. Perhaps we could build some sort of hyper loop to send them in bulk to speed up the process. Diagram of the idea, reversed https://xkcd.com/1599/ https://xkcd.com/1599/
- jdavis703 5y ago
  No, we should pay the taxes or user fees needed to maintain our infrastructure in a state of good repair.
  - h_anna_h 5y ago
    Sadly it's not the taxpayer that decides where the money goes. Getting new military airplanes, putting them in their own pockets, and bribing the media with it seems to be preferable for politicians.
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      The federal government doesn’t maintain sewer lines anywhere in the US except maybe on military bases and the like. At least in California we have special tax districts that are managed by a voter-elected board. The voters literally get to decide on infrastructure spending, at least in California.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Okay perhaps this joke was to subtle for the crowd here.

flatline 5y ago

A bigger question in my mind is whether this is a real problem, or ever could be with higher concentrations likely to occur in this way. Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer than having any, but what amount of what specific chemicals is likely to have a downstream effect? This poses a much broader question about low dosage toxicity for any number of chemicals in fresh water, ranging from agricultural run-off to industrial waste and spillage. Hard to study.

sandworm101 5y ago
>> Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer Except for fluoride and chlorine. Small amounts of those chemicals in water are a net health benefit. Society has to be careful about adding anything, but 100% pure water isn't the healthiest choice no matter what the commercials say. Also iodine in salt.
- giantg2 5y ago
  It's possible water without chlorine is beneficial too. Doesn't Paris use ozone and/or UVC instead? I also wonder about fluoride's benefits if we use toothpaste and mouthwash that has it. For example, I know people on well water or city water without it that don't have teeth issues.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Paris still uses chlorine. It may also use UV but nothing kills bacteria as effectively and constantly as bleach. In a large population with lots of ancient pipes not using chlorine would be very dangerous.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I wonder where I heard that, or if it's a different city. Also, they are generally using chloramine, not sodium hypochlorite.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Do you want to go and stage some awareness campaign to tell people not to flush their meds and hope they don't, or would you rather we be proactive about the reality we're in and do something about it now?

giantg2 5y ago
I don't know anyone who flushes their meds. Is this really a big issue? I thought it's mostly waste based sources.
post_break 5y ago
I have seen many news reports of free medication drops offs and asking people not to flush them. Does that answer your condescending question?