Why drinking water needs monitoring for HIV drugs

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/935126

 

 News Release 17-Nov-2021
Peer-Reviewed Publication
University of Johannesburg

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People who live in large towns and cities may think that upstream contamination doesn’t affect them. After all, water treatment plants protect them, removing heavy metals, bacteria, viruses and more from their tap water.

But the tap water in large towns and cities often come from rivers upstream. And there is another type of contamination that slips right through almost all water treatment plants.

That contamination is the medicines other people use upstream. Those pass through their wastewater treatment plants. Then the medicines end up in the rivers supplying drinking water to cities and towns downstream.

Pharma in our own taps

“What I can say to a city person is, not all clear water means clean. As researchers we know the challenges with pollutants. Water treatment plants cannot remove pharmaceuticals. But we release pharmaceuticals ourselves into wastewater on a daily basis,” says Nomngongo.

“In the cities, we get medications because we have medical aids (health insurance). Sometimes, we don’t care and say, ‘I am healed now’ and throw our medicines away. The easiest way to do it is to flush it down the toilet.

“We don’t think that this might come back to us through our own tap.”

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