If you're like me you have probably thought about putting a water purifying system into your home.
For one thing, we know there are pharmaceuticals in water supply.
For another, home purifying systems like reverse osmosis seem to be increasingly popular.
So my question is, do these systems remove pharmaceuticals from water.
And just because I've been reading around lately, my specific question is, "Does reverse osmosis remove pharmaceuticals from water?" First, just to settle one issue: there ARE pharmaceuticals in water supply.
That's a fact.
I don't know if you follow what Ralph Nader publishes, but his people recently studied formerly-classified government documents and found officials themselves have found and recorded over 2100 different cancer-causing chemicals found in one or more local US water supply.
You ask, how is that possible? Well, because government water regulations only require municipalities to check for 75 dangerous chemicals.
They don't even bother to look for the other 2000.
It's not that difficult to see where these chemicals might have come from, even if you don't live near an industrial zone or a factory that daily spews invisible chemicals into your air and the waterways around your town.
A Utah State University study has found up to 90 percent of oral pharmaceuticals pass through the human body without change.
So you are exposed to your neighbor's drugs where any of them are carelessly tossed out in the garbage or flushed down the drain, and from there slip unnoticed into local water ways and eventually sink slowly down into the water table you draw water from.
Suddenly my question, "Does reverse osmosis remove pharmaceuticals from water?" becomes urgent.
Right? Well, in spite of what I just said about the local officials in your water treatment authority, the people who watch over your drinking water do care about your health.
They are good people, almost to a man.
And no doubt are inspired by public service.
But they are also government employees, and we know these poor souls are almost always under-resourced, under-funded and under-paid.
They don't have a lot of motivation to check every last detail and they don't have the funds to install anything but the essentials at the municipal treatment centers they oversee.
You feel for these guys.
Worse, they are being asked to uphold federal water standards.
And we've seen how Ralph Nader's researchers revealed just how inadequate those standards and so-called safeguards are.
I suspect that in the end the people who are supposed to keep our water safe and free from pharmaceuticals reach a compromise with our health.
Since just one or two percent of the water they send to our homes we actually use for drinking -- the rest goes for washing dishes, cleaning the car, bathing the kids, watering the lawn, and so on -- they probably calculate there is a small risk that anything will go wrong.
And in the main, their gamble pays off.
Our cities are not struck with regular outbreaks of cholera.
But it does mean we have to protect ourselves.
And this brings us back to our question, does reverse osmosis remove pharmaceuticals from water? There are definitely pharmaceuticals in water supply and we need an answer.
Well, the answer is, yes and no.
It is yes, because reverse osmosis will take out all the chemicals and pharmaceuticals with a molecular structure bigger than the semi permeable membrane that reserve osmosis water passes through.
But it is no, because that membrane does not stop the many chemicals that are smaller than water.
So, since I am concerned about water purity for my children I won't be installing a reverse osmosis water purifier.
Does reverse osmosis remove pharmaceuticals from water? Not all of them.
So I have found others that do a better job of removing pharmaceuticals in a water supply.
Have a look at my web site and see what I recommend.