The Ying and Yang Principle

Within the last week or so, the Catholic church has announced that “The Pill” is causing male infertility.

I have to admit that my very first reaction was to roll my eyes and mumble something about “What next?”, but when I read the article, it made some sense. 

They are claiming that female hormones from women taking The Pill are being flushed into the water supply through human waste which in turn ends up in our drinking water.  When consumed by men, the hormones affect the levels of the male hormones and cause male infertility.  While we’d all like to think that our water treatment plants purge all things nasty from our tap water before it arrives in our homes, the fact of the matter is that pharmaceuticals and other chemicals can’t always be filtered out of the water.  This is not the first time such a claim has been made.  I remember years ago reading about fish failing to reproduce because they were too happy and lazy about spawning due to a surplus of the popular and legal feel good drug Prozac entering into lakes and streams.

I doubt that I am the only one who can see the irony in all of this.  After reading the article, I have to say, for the first time ever, I felt guilty about consuming Nyquil at regular intervals during my cold last week to help me breathe.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was contributing to the chemical cocktail seeping into our drinking water.  Now, mind you, I was feeling really poorly, and being a bit of a wuss when I can’t breathe properly, I still opted to take the drugs, reasoning that probably no one else in the world would deny themselves a bit of comfort from a cold for that reason.

But think about it.  In our quest for longevity and improved quality of life, we are pumping more and more drugs into our elderly and sick.  Where are those drugs going and what are they going to do to the rest of us?  My guess is that we’ll reach a point where the very things that we created to save us from our fates, will ultimately cause them.

When human waste is processed in a water treatment plant, sludge (Number 2′s and other non-liquid waste bits) is filtered out of the water.  This sludge contains a lot of good bacteria but also a lot of not so good things like chemicals and e. coli.  Sometimes this sludge is used for fertilizer for crops and sometimes those crops are destined for human dinner plates.  In recent years, we’ve already experienced e. coli outbreaks in fruit and vegetable crops.  Was contaminated sludge to blame?  I’m not sure.

I’m also not sure what the solution to all of this is.  Do we ban birth control pills?  Without an acceptable alternative, odds are we’d face a population explosion that would further complicate the matter.  Perhaps we devise a policy to control population like the Chinese, i.e. one child per family?  With their cultural preference for sons over daughters, they’ve assured that their population will be controlled for years to come because of an obvious lack of women in future generations to bear children.  Do we let our elderly and sick suffer and die without drug intervention?  Do we struggle to breathe when we have colds?

In these days of global warming, we’ve been so programmed to question the environmentally-friendliness of our cleaning products, our energy consumption and such things, but I don’t recall hearing anything about environmentally-friendly medical practices. 

In the meantime, we have to live, we have to drink water, and we will do what we can to sustain and improve human life – even if it is with drugs.  But, in a few years time, will there be so many drugs and chemicals in our water that a doctor’s recommendation to a patient will be “Take two glasses of water and call me in the morning.”?