How to Drink Drug-Free Tap Water

It might seem sometimes as though your toddler is taking strange, mood-altering drugs or that you'd like to slip your colicky infant a sedative.

But in reality, most parents think twice before giving their tiny tots so much as a dropper full of Children's Tylenol.

So the news from the Associated Press that at least 41 million Americans have drugs in their drinking water was especially disconcerting for parents with infants who drink formula mixed with tap water or toddlers who routinely ask for a glass of water before bed.

"Environmental pediatricians have known about this for quite a while, but there isn't a lot of data," notes Alan Greene, a San Francisco Bay Area pediatrician and author of Raising Baby Green. "But you have to expect things like mind-altering drugs and hormones to have a bigger proportional impact on kids, especially babies."

Yet among the more then 2,400 news stories that followed up on the AP's report, few had any advice for consumers on what to do about the problem.

Eco-blogs, such as NoImpactMan and Treehugger jumped on the topic, but mostly to dissuade people from using it as a reason to drink bottled water.

Their rationale is that several bottled-water brands, like Coca-Cola's(KO) Dasani or PepsiCo's(PEP) Aquafina, are not much better than tap water. They often come from public water sources, which aren't tested or treated for these particular polluters. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which usually takes its lead from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, doesn't require water bottlers to test for drugs and most don't yet make a point of filtering them out, according to the AP report.

The most common water filters -- the ones that attach to your tap or integrate into a carafe -- use carbon to clean your water. Experts say they aren't effective in this situation.

But you don't have to resign yourself to merely turning on your tap and hoping for the best. Reverse osmosis filters out at least some of the drug particles when it's used on a mass scale. And Greene says that, "it does a better job at home than anything else."

Everpure, a part of Pentair(PNR), has said that its ROM III system "effectively filter[s] out the heavier molecular particles common in many pharmaceutical drugs." It costs nearly $700 on the company's Web site and a set of three replacement cartridges sells on Amazon.com (AMZN) for $230. After the up-front cost of the system, that's about 65 cents a day to make sure you aren't inadvertently doping your toddler's sippy cup.

General Electric(GE), Sears(S) and Whirlpool(WHR) also make reverse-osmosis systems that run from $160 to $300, plus $60 to $100 a year on filters, according to Consumer Reports. But when we called these companies to confirm their systems would deal with this particular nuisance, GE didn't get back to us, and Sears and Whirlpool couldn't provide an answer. A Whirlpool representative said pharmaceuticals haven't been among the additives addressed when the company tests its filters.

Dr. Greene and fellow baby Guru Dr. William Sears suggest that another reasonable solution might be distilled water.