Locals say this city makes the world's best bagels from the best water, piped in from rustic reservoirs up to 150 miles north. Yet few know of a secret ingredient in their source water: a dash of pharmaceuticals.
Research studies have turned up minute amounts of more than 15 drugs or their byproducts in several pristine-looking rivers, a reservoir, and aqueducts feeding the country's biggest water system.
Though barely measurable, these pharmaceuticals are present in a variety worthy of a medicine cabinet: drugs for aches, infections, seizures and high blood pressure; hormones for menopause; the active ingredient in a popular sedative; and caffeine _ all bound for the city that never sleeps.
How did they reach waterways? The vast watershed, while mainly rural, stretches almost from Pennsylvania to Connecticut and encompasses lots of human activity. Human and veterinary medicines are excreted or discarded, and eventually enter source waters mostly through residential sewage or farm runoff.
And while these waters are processed at wastewater treatment plants upstate, much of the pharmaceutical residue passes right through, studies show.
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