I was trying to find a replacement water filter for a GE refrigerator (the machine is fresh from a $430 board swap that restored its ice-dispensing capability; examining the discarded PC board revealed a handful of chips and some relays labeled “Made in China”; perhaps $10 of parts total). This GE MWF seems to be the part. The product name is “Pharmaceutical refrigerator water filter” and I inferred that it was intended to be used in pharmacies somehow. Maybe they need extra pure water for giving to customers or for mixing with powders?
It turns out this is to address “Drugs in Our Drinking Water?”, something relatively new for Americans to worry about. Supposedly if your bones are aching you can just take a drink from the nearest river and will get plenty of ibuprofen. Or maybe just have a glass of tapwater.
What do readers think? Where does this paranoia rank? Above or below vaccine paranoia?
Given the extra estrogen in many women’s bodies due to the birth control pill, eventually being excreted as waste, more estrogen has been making its way into the wastewater system, and eventually back into the water. There’s been some research showing that the extra estrogen being added to the water is “feminizing” fish (their word, not mine ) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070521-sex-fish.html
So, if you’re worried about feminizing yourself or your family or your potential future offspring, and have no faith in your municipality’s ability to filter water, go for it. On the other hand, if you want to get in touch with your feminine side, rip that filter out.
The question is whether there is not so much ibuprofen as birth control pills. I think there is not a good, cheap test for the presence of these hormones in water.
Since some of the water is recycled again and again (used in home -> treatment plant -> used in home -> treatment plant) it might happen that over time the concentration will increase.
I’m not sure what you’re asking about. Is there a greater contamination of ground water by pharmaceutical & other chemical compounds than before: YES.
Does accumulation of such in organic tissue have the capacity to negatively affect human health: YES.
Should we, as a community of communities, be worried about it: YES.
Is that “paranoia”: NO.
There are endocrine disruptors in water supplies other than estrogen from birth control pills. BPA from plastics is just the better known of them.
Filters are expensive and need to be replaced frequently. I use a small distiller which will last forever. (The tap water here tastes disgusting. I wouldn’t bother only on account of protecting purity of essence and precious bodily fluids.)
At least one study suggested that lithium in water supplies is tied to less violent crime. It was discussed in a recent Radiolab podcast… though, to me, the evidence seems flimsy: http://www.radiolab.org/story/elements/
I don’t know about this specific case but a lot of these “Scientists have found X in Y” are more a testament to modern analytical chemistry, than to any great proliferation of chemicals.
Looking at the GE site, GE is glad to help by providing an orange “replace” light every six months (on a timer, not related to filter condition – in fact, the advice says replace when the light comes on OR when water flow is restricted, whichever occurs EARLIEST). The problem may be greed not paranoia.,
The web page for the filter says:
“Tested and verified to filter 5 trace pharmaceuticals including ibuprofen, progesterone, atenolol, trimethoprim, and fluoxetine” so presumably this is why it is called “pharmaceutical”.
The doses of pharmaceuticals that you are getting in your tap water are way too low to have any effect on your body, positive or negative. The dose makes the poison.
I would recommend that, if you have an accessible basement, you ditch the built in filter and, in the line leading to the fridge, install a nice big cartridge filter. These filter much better and for longer periods than those fridge filters and the refills are cheaper.
Here is the housing – it has “quick connect fittings” -so you would just cut the 1/4″ line leading to the fridge at some convenient point and push the 2 cut ends into the fittings. No plumbing skills required.
And this would be a typical cartridge:
http://www.amazon.com/KX-MATRIKX-Pb1-Extruded-Cartridge/dp/B008A9P5DK/
It’s rated for 2,500 gallons vs. 300 gallons for the MWF. So one of these $15 cartridges is equivalent to $400 worth of the GE cartridges.
Oops I missed the link on the housing:
http://www.amazon.com/Pentek-Quick-Connect-Guest-Housing/dp/B0030NA374/
You need to mount this somewhere where you can get to it to change the cartridge. My icemaker line ran thru a crawl space so what I did was to extend the line (using 2 more push fittings and 2 lengths of plastic tubing) to a more accessible place. This added maybe another $20 and another 10 minutes to the job.
As a peripheral note, there’s a commercial context here. Why not skip the filter and install a bypass (search amazon for “mwf bypass”)? We recently did a kitchen remodel in which three of the new appliances had filters pre-installed. Presumably this generates a decent revenue stream for filter manufacturers as most people treat them as standard equipment, necessary for the appliance to function properly.
Curious about this, and eager to avoid the hamster wheel of filter replacements, I asked my contractor, “if our water tastes fine, do we need these?” He couldn’t think of a reason, so we removed them. I guess he hadn’t read about the ibuprofen.
Personally I find a water filter to be helpful – it gets rid of chlorine and other bad tastes and odors in my local tap water, regardless of whether it filters out the ibuprofen too. But NOT the super expensive, small capacity built-in filters. My fridge (LG) came with the bypass gizmo which I installed when I put in my large in-line cartridge filter but it looks like GE makes you buy a 10 cent chunk of plastic for $15 to get off their filter moneymaking program. At least it is a one time expense. The whole conversion (bypass, filter housing, filter, remote tubing if necessary) would be less than 1 filter change if you DIY (requires almost no plumbing skill – connecting push fittings is no more difficult than plugging in a lamp). Even if you paid a plumber the payback is rapid due to the vast difference in filter cost and capacity.
Those MWF filters also apparently work for some kinds of biological contamination.
There are much cheaper “fits-MWF” options on Amazon, which are also NSF certified (or claim to be), but not for pharmaceuticals and biologicals.
I don’t think you can completely disregard the concern for things like endocrine inhibitors and other hormones. The dose makes the poison, sure, but the effective dose is minuscule and we’re not talking about systemic poisons.
Public water in the U.S. is incredibly safe, for all metrics that are measured. But they only measure what they must, by law. Private lab water tests always show that there are unregulated contaminants: inert, benign, carcinogenic, unknown.
I live on private water nowadays, so public oversight is not available to me. I used the MWF filters for a while, but prefer the taste of a reverse osmosis system. I drink a lot of water.
Having access to good tasting fresh tap water is important. When I grew up in Florida the tap water tasted awful – cholorinated and off-color. I think this is why sodas are so popular in the States. Also look at Mexico, who has the highest soda consumption per capita.
When I moved to Austria and Germany, I learned what good water tastes like from the tap, and now I have basically cut out sodas from my diet. The only thing is the water hardness but otherwise tastes great.
Hormones do not typically follow the “standard” dose response curve. Instead, they often exhibit large response at low (even minuscule) doses due to amplification by the receptor system and then not much response at higher doses due to saturation of the receptor system.
Trace drug paranoia makes rich people waste money. Vaccine paranoia kills children. So I would rank vaccine paranoia will above drug paranoia.
When it was shown that a chemical was turning male frogs to female frogs
in waters.
The company behind it went after the researchers.
Humans have destroyed the natural water cycle
so now you come along and say what’s wrong,
it all natural chemicals good for the human body.
Humans are also eating fertilizers and pesticides in their food
which gets discharged into the water in great quantity.
This has disrupted the Nitrogen cycle too.
end result is that you dead zones where there is no life in the oceans shores
where rivers meet the sea.
Of course you can always say Humans have been drinking dirty water
for millions of years. So clean water is actually bad for you
as it doesn’t keep the immune system regular thus
very bad auto-immune diseases. Thus the crying of anti-vacciners
have some truth behind them too.
Not sure what’s in out water but our experiments showed that it kills the yeast if it is not filtered. Whatever the basic filter does it helps dough rise for some reason.