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Measuring Pollution In Humans
CHaN_316 writes "Scientists have begun measuring pollutants in our body and the results sound like a chemical clean-up site. They've found things such as flame retardants, chemicals derived from DDTs, mercury, uranium, cotinine, and many more. The concern is a lot of this stuff is ending up in mother's milk. But hey, at least in the event of spontaneous combustion, I'll be partially protected."
What your asking for is oversight, and audit... and frankly I agree with them. If you want to audit the quality of their work, you should pay for it. Also, I would think you'd want an independent 3rd party doing the work anyway. I do disagree with them about it costing dearly, I have a friend who works in a lab that does 'walk up' business on water, food and so forth and I wanna say, depending on the subject matter, its less then $100. If that is too steep (reasonable to me if trusting my water was important) I'm sure you could google your way to a reasonable home kit online.
Otherwise, I recommend buying bottled water in bulk or getting one of those 5 gallon dispensers.
Type 2 diabetes is becoming a great concern in the U.S. as well, especially in children - an abundance of very fatty foods and a decrease in physical activity are among the causes.
I think Milloy's point, however, is that life expectancy has increased tremendously over the past hundred years, although medical advances probably greatly outweigh any negatives caused by pollutants.
I am a firm believer that no tap water is safe for human consumption
I mostly believe the opposite. Remember that before the invention of tap water, people drank out of rivers and streams that ran over lead and mercury deposits and had animals (and people) shitting in them. We can tolerate a good deal of crud in the stuff we consume.
That's not to say that pure water isn't preferred, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that tap water is unfit for human consumption altogether.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Testing 116 different chemicals is hard work, for a start not all the chemicals can be tested on one instrument, for instance they looked a uranium and other heavy metals, a inductively coupled Mass spectrometer isn't cheap 250,0000 and the mercury well that is tested on a special instrument to check for low levels. The organic molecules need to be tested on tandem LC mass spctrometers and also head space GC-MS. An enviromental lab could well be kitted out wil up to $2-5 million US dollars worth of the latest equipment, not to mention staff and other support resources.
IAAAC (I am an analytical chemist) who worked directly with testing water samples from municipal water treatment facilities, schools, and private clients. The Clean Water Drinking Act of 1976 mandates standards for community water suppliers, including standards for lead, iron, biologicals, copper, manganese, aluminum, nitrates, organics, chlorine, turbidity, etc. Your public water company has to have its water tested at a certified lab monthly, and if any of the parameters are out of whack, the EPA will hear about it faster than you can say "boo".
/. analytical chemist, I *highly* reccomend you get at least the lead, aluminum, and E coli numbers on your well water.
Saying your county won't pay for your water to be analyzed is a little untrue/misleading. Ask your water comany to send you results of the tests they have done. On the other hand, if you get your water from a private well, then the onus of testing IS on you. And as your
pax,
fred
The Environmental Working Group
These are some seriously dedicated guys who do environmental research and advocacy. They also maintain several interesting projects, including:
Bill Moyers - Trade Secrets
Bill Moyers did a great film about the problem.
A Google Search For Philip Landrigan
Dr. Philip Landrigan has done extensive work on body burdens in children and has written a number of books.
The National Center for Health Statistics doesn't quite agree with you.
Life expectancy by age, race, and sex, 1900-2000 U.S. Life Tables, 2000, table 11
Summary: A person that reached 20 years of age between 1900-1902 could expect to live until they were 62.79 years of age. A person that reached 20 years of age in the year 2000 could expect to live until they were 77.8 years of age.
15 extra years sounds tremendous to me.
I don't know about Morticians, but there's a team of Forensic Anthropologists in Knoxville, Tennessee, who run a 'body farm' with about 20 decomposing donated cadavers left out for around 4 years each to measure the processes of decomposition.
The centre has data on about 200 cadavers over the last 30 years - if anyone has evidence of this trend, they might be the ones.