Don't Drink the Water

AP reported that 24 major metropolitan cities in the US have traces of pharmaceuticals in the public drinking water. The article in USA Today says that US water utilities rarely release test results because they don't want to scare the public.

What I want to know is WHY there are pharmaceuticals in the drinking water. Do pharmaceuticals pass thur our bodies and then not brake down? Are pharmaceutical components being dumped and then contaminating the water supplies? And the paranoid one - are pharmaceuticals added on purpose? Here's a quote from the story

Peter Rogers, Harvard University professor of environmental engineering, said improvements in detection techniques could help fuel fears among the general public.

"We're chasing this down to molecular-sized measurements, so the more you look, the more you find," said Rogers. "I think the government and utilities are quite right to be very skittish about telling people their results. People will claim it is causing all sorts of problems. If I were a water utility, I would stop those measurements right away because if you measure something, it will get out, and people will overreact. I can just imagine a whole slew of lawsuits."

We'll if there are going to be a lot of lawsuits, then by all means, please don't tell us what we're drinking.