OMG: Drugs still in the water supply!

So if you were paying attention to national news yesterday, you might have come across a shrill AP story announcing to the world that there are DRUGS IN THE AMERICAN WATER SUPPLY! And they weren't put there by terrorists or anarchists - well, not exclusively anyway. The "scoop", such as it is:

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, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

Of course, if you pay attention to the news long enough (which, by the way, is hurtful for your brain and also will make you with the stupid), you realize that they don't call these things "news cycles" for no reason. As it turns out, this story went around last year, as you can see from this quote from a DoseNation post from April of 2007, a post we helpfully titled "Drugs in the water supply" for ease of later reference:

Jokes about dosing the water supply have long been a staple of countercultural troublemakers, but as it turns out, we've all been doing it for a long time now.... People really flush their unused drugs down the toilet? Who told people that was a good idea - was there a campaign back in the misguided '50s, alongside "cigarettes are healthy" and "let's all eat lard", to flush unused drugs instead of stockpiling them for the inevitable nuclear apocalypse?

At any rate, of course it's a terrible situation in some sort of vague, sci-fi fashion in which we all mutate or dissolve into puddles or something. I'm not denying that the idea of absorbing the waste pharma product of zillions of other Americans isn't inherently creepy (although it's obviously accompanied by the secondary idea of "how can we figure out how to distill this waste pharma into a more convenient pill-shaped delivery mechanism?"). In fact, it sounds kind of horrible; these substances are getting an opportunity to build up in the human body in long-term, uncontrolled experiments out in the wild. No FDA study can possibly hope to simulate this situation.

And yet, it seems to me that modern metropolitan filtration systems have undoubtedly improved dramatically over the period of time since, uh, you know, the first prescription drug was ever pissed into a toilet, and meanwhile no specific health problem has actually been associated with any of this wild gesticulating, so... maybe a little perspective is in order. Like, "OMG I might be drinking minuscule traces of anti-anxiety meds in my Evian and EWW is that guy dead or just homeless quick let's cross the street!"