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Drugs in the Water
Contraceptives, painkillers, antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs, blood-pressure medications, and antidepressants have begun showing up in lakes and rivers, groundwater, and drinking water. Because sewage-treatment plants are not designed to handle pharmaceuticals, many drugs—including unused drugs that are washed down sinks or flushed down toilets and incompletely metabolized drugs that are flushed down toilets in human waste or washed down laboratory drains in animal excrement—pass right through water-treatment plants into the drinking-water supply.
Effects on Human Health
Chandler residents will find themselves wondering—every time they take a drink of water and every time their children bathe, swim, or play in water—whether the water is safe and whether they, themselves, are test subjects in this foray into uncharted waters.
While the risks posed by chronic exposure to subtherapeutic concentrations of drugs are still unknown, scientists have expressed particular concern over the presence of chemotherapy drugs—which are designed to kill human cells—in our drinking water. Chemicals that can disrupt hormone production in our bodies are also showing up in our drinking water. The presence of antibiotics in waterways, scientists say, could cause disease-causing bacteria to become immune to treatment. Researchers in Italy designed a cocktail of 13 drugs to mimic the mixtures found in several Italian rivers and examined the effects of this cocktail on human cells. The study found that the cocktail of contaminants inhibited the growth of human embryonic kidney cells. After 48 hours of exposure, cell proliferation was reduced by 10 to 30 percent compared to the control values.
Wildlife Concerns
In analyzing the effects of pharmaceutical dumping on fish and other animals, scientists have documented that exposure to waste drugs has caused the "chemical castration" of male fish; delayed reproduction in female fish; disrupted development of fish's circulatory systems, eyes, and bladders; and caused damage to fish's kidneys and livers. According to a 1999 article in Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements, medications "could lead to cumulative, insidious, adverse impacts" on aquatic ecosystems—including declining reproduction and survival rates—that can "accumulate over time to ultimately yield truly profound changes," even in protected areas like national parks.
The Implications for Chandler, Arizona
If Covance opens a facility in Chandler, the company will subject hundreds of thousands of animals to drugs and chemicals that will then be dumped into Chandler's public sewer system. As government policies fall in line with the science regarding the emerging threat of pharmaceuticals in our waterways, cities will be forced to ensure that drug contamination of sewage effluent falls within legally mandated levels. The proposed Covance facility in Chandler will test new pharmaceuticals for which water-treatment technologies may or may not exist. Furthermore, the amount of pharmaceuticals dumped by Covance into the sewage system will dwarf the amount produced by Chandler's human population. By opening its doors to Covance, the city of Chandler will saddle future generations of Chandler residents with an enormous fiscal burden: initial investments in sewage-treatment technologies in order to remove pharmaceutical contamination and continual updates to these technologies in order to handle new classes of drugs that are tested on animals at Covance. In effect, Chandler residents will find themselves wondering—every time they take a drink of water and every time their children bathe, swim, or play in water—whether the water is safe and whether they, themselves, are test subjects in this foray into uncharted waters.
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