Okay, so they did a little more legwork than I, but the central concept and a lot of supporting data were there in my piece for Nature Medicine back in 2006. For that matter, I wasn't even the first to pick up on this. What's news, really, is that the general public might actually notice now. In case the day's more salacious news item distracted you, here's a good summary from the Wall Street Journal:

An investigation by the Associated Press found trace amounts of scads of drugs in drinking-water supplies around the country. For a list of what was found in the watersheds of 28 metro areas, click here. Among the water’s offerings were antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. There were traces of sedatives in water serving the city that never sleeps.

As was the case in 2006, nobody's quite sure what all these drugs in the water really mean. They could be very harmful, or a little bit harmful, or completely harmless. The pharmaceutical industry would like to believe the last, and least likely, of those three scenarios, while environmental extremists would prefer the first, and only slightly more likely one. These chemicals were developed specifically to affect human metabolism, so it's kind of unreasonable to expect that taking small doses of them - every day, for decades - would have no effect. They are extremely dilute, though, and we haven't seen any huge public health catastrophes in population statistics yet, so I'm betting that American tap water is still just about the safest beverage on Earth. Nonetheless, it might not be a bad idea to dump less of this stuff down the toilet.