[elegantlywasted (OP)]

Last year I had a terrible cold that lasted for 3 weeks, near the end I managed to get a doctors appointment. True to form, I felt better as soon as I got the appointment, but talking to my doctor we decided he would give me a prescription for amoxicillan (sp?) for me to take if the symptoms worsened. Well they didn't and now I have a bottle of antibiotics in my medicine cabinet. Should I hold on to them until the apocolypse, or perhaps there is a safe way to dispose of them without contaminiating the water supply.

Any thoughts??

[techmind]

The official response will be that you should "return the unused medicine to the pharmacist for disposal".

What the pharmacist does with them I don't know. Probably sends them to a specialist chemicals-disposal outfit that charges a small fortune, I shouldn't wonder.

[Carol-A]

Better than tipping them down the drain and allowing a few more nasties to become immune to them!

[Alandriel]

Please NO tipping into the water supply. There are enough hormones and other lovlies in there already.

Pharmacists send them in to be properly destroyed, usually via incineration as far as I know.

[Andrew K Fletcher]

Antibiotics in the water supply can create problems for sewage treatment by killing off anaerobic and aerobic bacterium, which digests the human bodily waste. Putting a bottle of pills down the toilet alone would not cause the problem, but when combined with the faeces and urine of people who have been taking antibiotics and others disposing of the pills down the toilet it can tip the balance and shut down the efficiency of the sewage works. Though this is probably due also to the vast numbers of toxic chemicals that people pay a fortune to flush down the toilet. Rather odd behaviour considering they put a lot of effort into getting the cash to flush away. “Life is a bar of soap” “That’s life-boy”