Without a doubt, the following article is more frightening than any bear market recession. If you haven't heard, there's apparently many more contaminants in the nation's water supplies than one might think conceivable.

According to the piece from the Associated Press, major metropolitan water sources (e.g., Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.) read positive for very small amounts of various kinds of pharmaceutical particulates -- we're talking sex hormones, antibiotics, cholesterol-lowering nostrums, drugs that combat heart ailments, depression/anxiety, asthma, etc.

Maybe I'm naive, but I was caught completely off guard by this study. Imagine tiny traces of prescription medications floating around in the water both you and I consume -- makes me shudder. And, yes, although I drink bottled water exclusively, this aqua source is not necessarily out of harm's way -- remember that a lot of bottled water might only be filtered from municipal sources. Also, the article says that water from wells might be contaminated, as well as water treated by home filtration units -- apparently it takes unique processes to filter out pharmaceuticals, such as reverse osmosis.

Now, some will accuse me of being hysterical and will want me to definitively highlight that the amounts of these contaminants are extremely small -- as the article states, we're talking parts per billion and/or trillion. However, what concerns me is that we possibly have been, from what I intuit from the article, exposed to this stuff for a while now -- what are the effects of constant exposure to small amounts of drugs? Do these pharmaceuticals accumulate within our tissues over time? Plus, what happens to someone who doesn't take any prescription drugs, but then later in life has to take ones that she's already been drinking in small amounts via the water supplies?

At the very least, this makes great fodder for an M. Night Shyamalan movie, with the twist being that whatever horror was introduced in the plot was due to something in the water! Beverage makers such as Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) and PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) might take away some marketing benefit from this news. Bottled water, as well as even soda, will be perceived -- whether rightly or wrongly -- as better to drink than tap water, in my opinion. Coke and Pepsi have scored wins with Dasani and Aquafina, respectively, and I'd imagine people will feel the lesser of two evils is the consumption of premium water from the supermarket (it should be noted that reverse osmosis is a component of the purification protocol for both Dasani and Aquafina, although whether this guarantees that they are 100% free of pharmaceuticals, I do not know).

Steven Mallas owns shares of Coca-Cola; positions can change at any time.