Consumers' use of pharmaceuticals, personal care products polluting rivers and oceans with toxic chemicals

Our water supply is becoming increasingly contaminated -- and not just by big factories dumping pollutants into the rivers. It is consumers, often unwittingly, who are poisoning rivers and oceans by sending potentially toxic chemicals down the drain. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated its researchers have found pharmaceuticals and personal care products -- or PPCPs -- in nearly every water supply they have tested.

The issue is not new. In the United Kingdom, the dangers of PPCPs were first recognized in the 1970s. In the U.S., however, it was another twenty years before the scientific community began to take notice, largely in response to the efforts of one scientist, Christian Daughton. Chief of the environmental chemistry branch of the EPA's Environmental Sciences Division, Daughton began reporting on the dangers of PPCPs in the water supply during the mid-1990s.

In 1999, Daughton co-wrote, with Thomas A. Ternes of the Institute for Water Research and Water Technology in Germany, the first comprehensive article on PPCPs in the U.S. water supply. The article "Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: Agents of Subtle Change?" appeared in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

This landmark article discussed how "priority pollutants," such as agrochemicals, were "only one piece of the larger puzzle" of human-made environmental risk factors. Daughton and Ternes wrote:

"One large class of chemicals receiving comparatively little attention comprises the pharmaceuticals and active ingredients in personal care products (PPCPs), which are used in large amounts throughout the world; quantities of many are on par with agrochemicals. Escalating introduction to the marketplace of new pharmaceuticals is adding exponentially to the already large array of chemical classes, each with distinct modes of biochemical action, many of which are poorly understood."

The authors went on to write that exposure to PPCPs, especially for aquatic organisms, may be more chronic than exposure to pesticides and other industrial chemicals "because PPCPS are constantly infused into the environment wherever humans live or visit." Daughton and Ternes warned in 1999 that prolonged exposure "could lead to cumulative, insidious, adverse impacts" that may not appear until it is too late to intervene.