Prevention, Treatment, Monitoring Urged In Senate Testimony

Washington, DC - A leading advocate for drinking water safety
testifying today before a U.S. Senate Committee said Congress should
take immediate steps to protect consumers' health in the wake of an
Associated Press investigation that found that the drinking water of
millions of Americans may be contaminated by a wide range of
pharmaceuticals.

David Pringle, testifying before a Senate subcommittee on water quality
Tuesday, said the government should take immediate steps toward
preventing pollution from drugs in drinking water in order to protect
the health of Americans as well as a "modern Noah's Ark" of other
animals exposed to pharmaceuticals.

"Common sense dictates it's not a good idea to drink somebody else's
medicine," said Pringle, a New Jersey water specialist representing
Clean Water Action and its affiliate, the New Jersey Environmental
Federation. "We know enough to take timely action now. Attention should
be focused on pollution prevention and on ensuring affordable, healthy
drinking water, a task which is well within our capacity."

Pringle, the New Jersey group's campaign director, serves as the
Speaker of the New Jersey State Assembly's public health appointee to
the Drinking Water Quality Institute and is chair of its Health
Subcommittee. He testified Tuesday before the Senate Environment and
Public Works Committee Subcommittee on Transportation Safety,
Infrastructure Security and Water Quality hearing on "Pharmaceuticals
in the Nation's Water: Assessing Potential Risks and Actions to Address
the Issue."

The hearing came in the wake of an Associated Press March
investigation that reported a vast array of pharmaceuticals including
antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones have
been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million
Americans.

In his testimony Tuesday, Pringle called on the committee to:

• Restore $10 million in proposed budget cuts by the Bush
  administration that fund water quality monitoring, analysis and
  research under the United States Geological Service's National Water
  Quality Assessment (NAWQA) and to restore smaller but important cuts to
  USGS' toxics' assessment and other programs that are critical in
  gauging the breath and depth of this problem;
• Support
  additional research and developing standards to improve drinking water
  and wastewater treatment technology aimed at removing drugs from
  industrial, agriculture and other sources with priority placed on
  preventing contamination;
• Pollution prevention and toxic
  use reduction must be vigorously pursued, especially in the
  reformulation of human and veterinary medicines at each stage of their
  life cycle.
• Encourage programs to discourage the flushing of unused drugs into wastewater systems;
• Engage
  the National Academy of Sciences in furthering its review of the
  science of occurrence and health and ecological effects of
  pharmaceuticals;
• Target the cleanup of waters with
  evidence of deformed fish and other ecological impacts potentially due
  to pharmaceutical pollution.

The primary sources of the drug contamination of drinking water,
said Pringle, include human waste, industrial discharges, disposal of
unused drugs, manure used as fertilizer and agricultural runoff.
Besides impacting humans, Pringle said studies suggest a host of
species can be impacted, most notably the feminization of male fish
living downstream from wastewater treatment plants.

Pringle noted that bottled water is not a solution because it is
less regulated than tap water, is more expensive and is drawn largely
from the same sources as public tap water supplies.

The New Jersey Environmental Federation (NJEF), the NJ
chapter of Clean Water Action, has been a statewide leader on drinking
water, environmental justice, public health, safe energy and other
issues for over 20 years. NJEF has over 100,000 individual members and
100 member groups. For more information, visit
www.cleanwateraction.org/njef

Clean Water Action is the nation's leading grassroots
environmental campaign organization, with more than 1 million members
nationwide. Clean Water Action has been a leader in protecting
America's waters, the public health and empowering people to take
charge of their environmental future. www.cleanwateraction.org

# # #

Resources

Pharmaceuticals In Drinking Water, Testimony of David Pringle, Campaign Director, New Jersey Environmental Federation, On Behalf of: New Jersey Environmental Federation and Clean Water Action (pdf, 40kb)

You will need to have the Adobe Acrobat Reader properly installed to view PDF documents. You can get it free from Adobe.