The Vatican’s castigation of The Pill for allegedly polluting water and contributing to male infertility narrows the lyrics of an environmental hymn about the dangers of casually discarded prescription drugs.
Among other things, scientists have tried to gauge the perils to drinking water and aquatic life when outdated prescriptions tossed into toilets, as well as drug remnants in urine, are flushed and pass unscathed through treatment plants into rivers and streams. One study even found the active ingredient from Prozac in fish (no word on whether the fish were too hooked on the antidepressant to inhale anglers’ lures).
And an investigative team from The Associated Press spent five months studying potential problems in water in the United States before reporting in March 2008 that it had found a wide variety of pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones in drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.
Although the AP reports acknowledged that the concentrations were small, they said the presence of prescription and over-the-counter drugs in drinking water of 24 major metro areas underscored scientists’ concerns about long-term consequences.
The waters were roiled around the turn of the century (THIS century, not the 20th one we keep confusing with this one), after studies in Europe found pharmaceutical traces in unlikely places.
“This is an important new research area," A. Lynn Roberts of Johns Hopkins University said in April 2002. "Over the past few years, scientists in Europe have found pharmaceuticals in natural waterways, sewage treatment effluents, and even in drinking water. Yet until this year there have been virtually no scientific studies examining this issue in the United States.”
Roberts made the comment in connection with the announcement of a three-year, $525,000 grant to a team she headed at the Baltimore university to study pharmaceutical residues in drinking water, sewage treatment plants, and coastal waters.
The Hopkins team developed techniques to measure the risk factors of thousands of drugs, although it excluded hormonal ones, Roberts told Newsmax.
Not so the Vatican’s controversial report, which narrowed the broad-based concerns about the effects to just the hormonal factor involving the church’s decades-long nemesis: contraceptive pills.
The Pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tons of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, who is president of the Vatican-based World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, which issued the report.
In addition, "we have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the Pill," Castellvi said in a Jan. 3 article in the Vatican newspaper, without elaborating on what that evidence actually is, according to AFP.
"We are faced with a clear anti-environmental effect which demands more explanation on the part of the manufacturers," Castellvi said.
Several organizations criticized the report, saying the hormones in contraceptives lose their characteristics when they are metabolized.
What’s more, the hormones, such as estrogen, “are present everywhere . . . in plastic, in disinfectants, in meat that we eat," said Flavia Franconi of the Society of Italian Pharmacology.
Back in the United States, concern about the potential harm from discarded prescription drugs prompted the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to issue the first consumer guidelines for the proper disposal of prescription drugs in February 2007.
They include the following:
Take unused, unneeded, or expired prescription drugs out of the original containers and throw them in the trash.
Mix such drugs with trash such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter and put them in impermeable containers such as empty cans or sealable bags, to ensure that nobody tries to retrieve them from the garbage.
Flush them down the toilet only if the label or patient information specifically says to do so.
The guidelines include a list of drugs that should be flushed instead of being put in the garbage, including OxyContin painkiller and its generic, oxycodone, and Percocet, a painkiller that contains oxycodone and acetaminophen.
The White House guidelines and other drug information can be found at http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/factsht/proper_disposal.html.
© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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