On Removing Antibiotics in Water

By now, a lot of people have read the recent news story about antibiotics in water, and I've had a few hits just in the last 24 hours looking for ways to filter it. I still don't know how you would filter them out, but I did do a little Googling myself and found that according to Dr. Craig Adams, the John and Susan Mathes Missouri Chair of Environmental Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, it's not such a big deal to remove antibiotics, it's just that cities have no reason to do so until they're required to:

Adams and three colleagues received the Rudolph Hering Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2003 for research into the removal of antibiotics in drinking water. The research could become instrumental if governmental agencies require regulation of antibiotics in the future.

Adams' study shows that while many surface and groundwater supplies in the United States contain antibiotics, commonly used water treatment processes should be able to remove those antibiotics effectively, should health and environmental officials one day require and regulate their removal. At the moment, almost none do.

I'm concerned about antibiotics in water, but obviously there are ways to deal with them. However, it will take much longer to get it out of our food, which is being tainted from the bottom of the food chain right on up to the top, by soil, prey organisms and water that's already contaminated. Obviously this is something that the sooner regulation is put into action, the better. Although, considering some two thirds of antibiotics are fed to livestock and presumably ends up in their waste and directly in our food from them, maybe this drinking water thing isn't as big an issue as you think. Unless you stop feeding so many antibiotics to livestock we're raising to eat, you're not going to get it out of the ecosystem no matter how well you treat the water. But then again, at least cows and chickens don't wear makeup and other cosmetics or take antidepressants.

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