And if less-effective antibiotics were not bad enough, there is a second reason to worry about drugs in our water. Traces of a variety of steroids, not to mention industrial and household products, may be interfering with delicate, exquisitely vulnerable hormonal receptors in all living creatures. These receptors are key cellular switches that are especially important during any organism's early development.
In the laboratory and in nature, man-made estrogen "mimic-molecules" are believed to be disrupting embryonic organisms across many species, even causing neurological and reproductive birth defects. Could the water supply be helping to distribute the estrogen mimic-molecules? Water engineers, for the record, are not worried. The American Water Works Association declined to speak to me but is on record that nothing is awry: "The occurrence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in potable and nonpotable water has not been established."
Scientists in Minneapolis presented abundant evidence to the contrary. For one thing, most farmers liberally dose pigs, cows and chickens with hormones. Those male and female hormones are definitely reaching the environment in both liquid and solid animal wastes. Birth control drugs, even steroids used by body builders and pro athletes, are making similar deposits. The question is what effects the chemicals are having, and whether the water (or something else) might be the source.
One new clue came from the Mississippi River, where James Levitt of the University of Minnesota studied a variety of fish coping with endocrine mimic-molecules. Levitt compared walleyed pike upstream from a lock, where there were no endocrine mimic-molecules, with fish caught downstream from the lock, where there was plenty of sewage effluent and no shortage of estrogen disrupters. The male fish swimming in the dirty water had no sperm, and malformed testes. The female fish in the same water had similarly degenerated ovaries.
Should we care about walleye? Are their gonads the proverbial canaries in the coal mine? Some scientists think so. Researchers point to a large number of other water-dwelling creatures that are having similar problems. Alligators, carp, otters and other aquatic creatures are increasingly prone to disturbing defects or illnesses in their reproductive tracts. Why? The link to drugs and other industrial effluvia is tantalizing, circumstantial -- but controversial.
For years physicians have been arguing about sharply falling human sperm counts (in England's Thames River, these have been directly linked to water supplies). There are rising numbers of breast and uterine cancers, and hypospadias, a grisly birth defect of the urethra and penis. But the scariest element of the endocrine disrupter story was never explicitly mentioned in Minneapolis. The water specialists never quite brought themselves to say that some of the estrogen-mimic effects can be engineered in the laboratory by vanishingly small doses of chemicals like ethinyl estradiol, the key ingredient in birth control pills. Scientists are finding ethinyl estradiol in water at levels that are not all that different from those that cause untoward effects in the lab. You don't need big, easily detected doses to get significant changes.
So what's the bottom line? How freaked out should an ordinary citizen be? The best answer so far: Be aware but don't panic. That was the word from a scientist at the federal agency leading the way in analyzing drugs in the water: the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) -- an agency that has long had scientists tramping around and investigating American streams and rivers.
Carefully avoiding the question of whether the drugs and other chemicals in water present any danger to human health, the USGS brought a lot of know-how to Minneapolis. Its impact was exceeded only by a platoon of German scientists (the world leaders in this field). Dana Kolpin, the lead author of the most eagerly awaited USGS paper, was not at liberty to discuss much of his data -- it's under wraps pending publication in a journal -- but Kolpin still gamely agreed to try to put the problem in perspective.
"I wouldn't get terrified," he says. "We're not trying to scare people." As he and other scientists at the meeting repeatedly reminded me, you'd have to guzzle thousands of gallons of the dirtiest water in America to get enough of a drug to constitute a single dose.
Kolpin's forthcoming article will analyze water samples from 141 American rivers. The USGS went looking for five broad classes of antibiotics, over-the-counter antacids, birth-control medicines, warfarin, codeine, insecticides, Prozac and Paxil, Advil and Tylenol -- even the ingredients that give colognes their musky odor and detergents their bubbly qualities. The compounds are found in every medicine cabinet, every cleaning closet, every supermarket. You're using this stuff. So am I.
But the data could be eye-opening. One hint Kolpin dropped was that of the 95 compounds the USGS researchers went looking for, they found 75. Eighty percent of the streams sampled had at least one compound. "It wasn't just finding one compound," Kolpin told his peers. "We need to look at mixtures and multiple compounds."
Next page: So what's the FDA doing?