Clear Choices—Which Product Claims Don’t Hold Water?

Kohler Co.

Perhaps you’ve read the news reports, or maybe your neighbor mentioned it at the last dinner party: There are pharmaceutical contaminants in your drinking water. We understand how scary that sounds. But despite what some water-filter manufacturers say, don’t run out just yet to buy a new pitcher filter or faucet-mount or under-sink filtration system.

Although a few manufacturers of water-filtration products claim that their products can remove these contaminants from your water, many experts believe that these claims might be premature. (Incredibly, one company that makes these claims all but acknowledged this, as you’ll read later.) Not only is there no industry standard in place to certify a product’s effectiveness at removing pharmaceuticals from the water that flows from your home’s tap, but some scientists say the concentrations of pharmaceuticals in tap water are so low that removing them might not be necessary in the first place.

TRACE OF CONCERN. Ever since The Associated Press released details of an investigative report in March 2008 that revealed that there are traces of prescription and nonprescription drugs in the drinking water of 24 major metropolitan areas, there has been concern among consumers, public health officials and the water-filtration industry as a whole. After the report hit, manufacturers say they received an overwhelming influx of calls from consumers who wanted to know whether their products removed traces of pharmaceuticals, such as antibiotics, antidepressants, painkillers and sex hormones, from their drinking water.

The problem was that manufacturers didn’t have any answers. And based on the statements of industry experts and water-purification scientists whom we interviewed, there’s still no strong evidence that manufacturers have any better answers today.

But that hasn’t stopped four companies from touting the benefits of their products. Both Brita and PUR claim that their pitchers remove certain pharmaceuticals, and Culligan and Everpure have implied indirectly that their products that use reverse osmosis (RO) purification can remove pharmaceuticals, as well. None of the manufacturers charges extra for models that they claim remove pharmaceuticals.

However, their claims are questionable and misleading. Consumers should know that national testing laboratories still are developing standards to detect and identify these compounds in drinking water. And neither of the two main third-party testing bodies for water-filtration products—National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) and Water Quality Association (WQA)—have developed a test to certify a water filter’s effectiveness at removing pharmaceuticals. Both organizations, as well as industry manufacturers, created a task force to develop a pharmaceutical testing standard; however, NSF says it could be a year before it has the beginning stages of a standard in place. But Joe Harrison, WQA technical director, says, “We aren’t even close.”

In other words, for now, you have to take a company’s word regarding a product’s ability to eliminate or reduce pharmaceuticals. And that’s a lot to ask.

It’s difficult for us to accept the claims that are made by Brita and PUR, because there are no independent tests to back up the internal tests on which their claims are based. How do Brita and PUR justify their claims? Both companies tell us that their tests are based on their knowledge of how NSF and WQA test for nonpharmaceutical contaminants. But as we’ve made clear, neither NSF or WQA has a test for pharmaceuticals, so it seems to us that Brita and PUR only can be guessing as to how those tests should work.