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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."
Drink more Water.
report that bodies are taking up to 10% longer to decompose than they used to from all the BHA and BHT added to preserve freshness.
Live fast, eat a lot of antioxidant ladden potato chips, leave a durable, good looking (if somewhat corpulent) corpse.
Gives you more time for a clean dehydration as well, so you can make that trip to Orion in all your leathery splendor.
KFG
Milloy noted that despite all the chemicals, the overall U.S. population is living longer and healthier.
I do not know about the U.S., but things are different in Germany.
[QUOTE]
Overweight & Diabetes in Germany Due to overweight, obesity and inactive lifestyles, the number of people with diabetes is set to double from five million to 10 million in Germany in the next 10 years, doctors warned at a meeting of the German Society for Internal Medicine in Wiesbaden this week. Most worrying is the number of young people who are developing type 2 diabetes because of obesity. Unlike type 1 diabetes - an autoimmune disease that usually develops in children or young adults - type 2 diabetes is linked to obesity and lifestyle, and has traditionally been seen in mainly middle-aged and older adults.
[UNQUOTE] ( c.f. here )
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
A recent article in Science News (a journal) described how one class of flame retardants called PBDEs are more common in the US than in Europe and how blood levels in Americans are on average 10 times higher. It also says there may be a link to ADD, which is also more common in the US. Maybe your next futon should be an organic one?
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.
When you say 'county', I'm assuming you were refering to your county's health department, or equivalent. If so, then to answer your question, no it is not. The only way they will step in is if there is major contamination.
Concerns involving the purity of drinking water should be addressed to your water department. But even then, the standards they have to meet are not very strict, and they will probably tell you the same thing.
As for me, I am a firm believer that no tap water is safe for human consumption, so I've decided to purify drinking water at home. Food tastes much better when cooked in clean water.
Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to say what will happen in the long term.
With such chemicals like DDT, which continues to remain at high levels in the surrounding environment despite having been banned in 1970. I wrote a couple papers on the role of DDT in the decline of the Californian Condor, and it is really a scary chemical.
Some scientists are even beginning to look at a link between DDT levels and breast cancer, as DDT and several other pesticides, which are absorbed and stored long-term in fat, also are capable of causing hormonal changes by acting much like estrogen. The unnatural changes caused by the continuing presence and buildup of DDT in mammary tissue could understandably be a large factor in the rising occurence of breast cancer. It could also have some particularly negative affect in men as well, as it acts as a blocker to the normal male hormones.
And that is just one of the chemicals commonly found in the body, as described in the article...
I am a chemist, and I am certain that there is no content of value in this article. We have analytical techniques that can detect chemicals at parts per trillion or less. Pointing out that we can find traces of the breakdown products of nicotine, flame retardents, DDT, etc is meaningless unless you actually say:
1: How much
2: How toxic it is
The truth is, you are a thousand times more likely to die driving to the store to buy your fruits and veges than you are to die from the trace amounts of pesticides on the food. Everything you eat contains hundreds of toxic chemicals in some amount. Every drop of sea water contains 50 BILLION gold atoms, for perspective. Do people farm the ocean for gold?
Do not let chemical scare-stories alarm you. 99% of them are full of it.
Don't tell the terrorists that there might tbe uranium in their body...They might try to blow themselves up...ohh wait they do that anyways...
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.
Don't you hate it when people writing articles make up their own units? Whoever heard of measuring pollution in "humans"? This is pure bunk. Most useful units are standardized and published by ISO, and "humans" sure aren't listed anywhere I can see. And anyway, what's the symbol going to be, "hm"?
Standardized units are essential when doing studies which claim repeatability. Anything less is simply not science. I shudder to think what useless arguments this will produce, when a swedish team checks their pollution readings in scandinavian humans, while an italian teams does the same in latin humans. At sufficiently high readings, the difference could be several percent! Then there are issues of hair colour and hair style, which could even change the results of the experiment years after the fact! And don't get me started on the problems every time bell bottoms get back into fashion.
If you ask me, shoddy science begins with the wrong units. And humans are definitely the wrong unit to use in this case.
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
Alar on apples. Bogus
Silicon Breast Implants Bogus
DDT Mostly Bogus
Somewhere along the way we lost our ability to actually use science and facts to evaluate things and have fallen back on a faith based consensus pseudo-science.
Remember, None of us are getting out of here alive. Life - A sexually transmitted terminal disease. Always fatal.
But it's OK, says the skeptical environmentalists: after all, we do not have definitive proof that all those substances are bad for you.
Never mind that cancer is on the rise (could just be demographics, right?) and that dozens of species other than humans show hormonal abnormalities correlated with the presence of manufacured chemicals (could just be parasitic infections). Why be prudent and conservative if we can increase the GNP by 0.1%?
In fact, it's probably impossible to prove at all that they are bad for you because no single substance may harm you--they may only harm you synergistically. And since you are exposed to all of them constantly, it is impossible to assign responsibility to individual chemicals. But without definitive proof that an individual chemical is harmful by itself, we wouldn't want to limit the freedom of corporations to pollute, would we?
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.