Last week, FDA announced that it had joined EPA and other federal agencies in Tox21, a program to improve, and greatly accelerate, chemical screening of toxicologically active chemicals. The program had been in place for two years, but FDA’s participation signals a new scope and new possibilities.

Last year, we blogged about reports of unusually high levels of APIs in the water supplies in and around Patancheru, a hotbed of drug manufacturing in India. (Here are several posts, including interviews with The Land Institute’s expert Stan Cox.)

Reading an article online today from the Boston Herald on how AstraZeneca is outfitting its new Waltham, Mass. R&D center with the latest and greatest green bells and whistles . . . it's good to see, but hardly surprising.

At long last, four pharmaceutical facilities--two at AstraZeneca, and one each at Schering-Plough and Allergan--have earned EPA's much coveted Energy Star recognition.

Today, the terrifying image of Chernobyl was invoked to describe what could happen if the pharma industry fails to deal with the problem of active ingredients within the water supply (as seen and documented in Patancheru, India.)

Since (as I mentioned) the "cure" for drugs in groundwater is not going to happen quickly, there is something we can do right now. There are, approximately, 20 million people without healthcare in the US of A at the moment. That means they might be able to get medical attention at a hospital emergency room or free clinic. However, they may not be able to obtain needed medicines.

Since the first step in groundwater remediation is analyzing what is in the water at the various locations, anyway, we can use this information in the meantime to alleviate one other problem. Whynot publish the information of which drugs are at which location? That way, if someone needed Prozac, they could be sent to City "X" and drink the water. Need a "statin?" Why, just move to City "Y." We will know the levels of each drug, so the emergency room doctor can prescribe how much free water each patient should drink each day from the tap at any given city.

This will modify a common phrase to "drink two gallons and call me in the morning." But, it will be (as Ann Landers used to say) "when life hands you a lemon, make (highly diluted, in this case) lemonade."

Thus, we will be (pun intended) "killing two birds with one stone."

There have been reports lately about prescription drugs being found in our drinking water. The levels are relatively low, so no flares were sent up by the EPA. It is somewhat like the lead in toys from China: probably been there for some time, just not looked for until now.

The source of industrial pollution is somewhat easy to discover: air monitoring at an indistrial site, checking the effluent from a plant, looking for seepage from underground tanks are all standard procedues for state and the federal EPA/DoEP. But, where do these drugs come from?

Well, as I once pointed out to a friend, individual humans are a terrible source of pollution. [Imagine the formaldehyde from cemetaries, not to mention the plutonium in buried pacemakers because we didn't want to desecrate poor aunt Myrtle.] We excrete both unused drug entities and metabolies continuously. Multiply what we excrete by millions and you see where we are.

The problem is made more difficult by the huge number of chemicals, all physiologically active, we need to screen for in drinking water. Literally thousands of chemicals, not to mention industrial chemicals, need to be discovered and removed from or water supply. This will not be fast or inexpensive. New and better ways are going to be needed to bring our water back to where it is, once more, the elixer of life....and we can once again recommend drinking at least 6 glasses a day.

Bottled water is suggested as an answer to the pollution by drugs (by bottled water sellers, obviously). One minor problem with that idea: most commercial bottled water comes from the same municipal sources we all use right now. Obvioulsy, merely passing it through charcoal doesn't work, since that what many municipalities already do! (Forget for a minute the benzene found in Perrier a few years ago: that was an industrial accident.)

So the water bottlers want you to believe that paying $20/gallon for their water, pumped from the same sources you are already drinking makes them any safer? To answer Agnes' blog (On Pharma) question: Evian spelled backwards is Naive...what the bottled water people hope you are! Me? I'll stay with single malt whiskey for now. (After all, "whiskey" is an Irish word for water of life, anyway ;-D)