Water Contaminant Reference List
If you want information about the most common water treatment issues, here’s a list that will take you direct to the Pure Water Occasional’s website.
2000 Water Birds Have Been Found Dead on Chilean Beaches–More in Peru
Some 2,000 birds have been found dead on a four-mile stretch of beach in central Chile.
The birds include grey petrels, pelicans, gannets and Guanay cormorants.
The mysterious reportings of dead birds in Chile follow other grisly discoveries in neighboring Peru. Thousands of maritime birds including pelicans as well as dolphins have been found dead on Peru’s shores in recent weeks. While environmentalists have suggested that oil exploration work is a possible culprit, government authorities blame warm water.
Chloramines and Fish
Here’s a brief piece from an aquarium site that explains monochloramine and its effects on fish. To read more. It is reprinted from the Pure Water Occasional for October, 2011.
Because chlorine is extremely unstable and dissipates quickly from water, chloramines were developed and are now primarily used to maintain water quality in pipelines that are often quite old and extend for many miles. Chloramine (NH2Cl), an inorganic compound that is a combination of chlorine and ammonia, has been used for more than 90 years. But its proliferation began in the mid-1980s. Of the three types of chloramine used in drinking water, monochloramine, comprised of chlorine and ammonia, is most often applied to public water systems.
Chloramines received a terrible reputation when water utilities added the compound and failed to adequately educate the public because it resulted in massive tropical fish deaths for no apparent reason. The Internet as we know it today was not available then, so aquarium publications, fish clubs and pet shops did their best to spread the word for coping with this problem.
Chloramine is an invisible compound that fish take directly into their bloodstream through their gills. Fish exposed to this compound experience stress, damaged and burned gills, erratic behavior and sometimes even jump out of the aquarium. It is a horrible, yet preventable, death. Fish seen gasping at the water surface with rapid, labored breathing could be suffering the effects of chloramine poisoning (especially if these symptoms occur following a water change).
Jesus Hated War — Why Do Christians Love It So Much?
By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News
Posted on December 28, 2009, Printed on December 28, 2009
When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”
Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.
In his memoir, It Doesn’t Take A Hero, Schwartzkopf claimed that he kept a Bible at his bedside throughout the war.
I cringed knowing that, according to the biblical Jesus, God is never on the side of the victors. The God of love that Jesus revealed was on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the starving, the sick, the naked, the meek who were victimized by unjust power.
Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.
I cringed when I heard Schwartzkopf claim God’s blessings on the carnage that he helped orchestrate because similar claims have been used to rationalize killing throughout history, from ancient times to some of the darkest days of the modern era.
As the German Nazis went about their systematic purging of any and all leftist or anti-fascist groups – Jews, socialists, homosexuals, liberals, communists, trade unionists and conscientious objectors to war – they insisted that God was on their side, too.
Adolf Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s will. German soldiers, both in WWI and WWII, went into battle with the words “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) inscribed on their belt buckles.
Invoking “Gott Mit Uns” didn’t work just on the uneducated, brain-washable and obedient citizens and conscripted soldiers of Germany. The slogan also convinced most of the educated Protestant and Catholic clergymen to comfortably proclaim from their pulpits that Hitler’s wars were endorsed by the Christian God, and therefore every military action could be justified and carried out without guilt.
Most Germans wanted to believe that Hitler’s wars had to be fought for some higher purpose, a master plan that they trusted would benefit them all by creating “Lebensraum” (living space), which would mean security for the pure Aryan race.
Aggression as Defensive
In the Nazis’ up-is-down world, the propagandists convinced average Germans that Hitler’s wars were purely defensive (“the sword has been forced into our hands”). The terrorizing of foreigners in a neighboring country, in order to steal their land, was the patriotic thing to do.
Convincing the German public to engage in murder for the state took a lot of diligent work from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
Goebbels had to persuade the Germans that their neighbor’s land and oil and mineral resources could legitimately be taken by any means necessary in order to realize the Fuhrer’s dream of the “Thousand-year Reich,” where perpetual peace for the privileged German people would finally be realized.
The “collateral damage” done to the innocent civilian-victims of Europe and the Soviet Union, was felt to be unavoidable, and the “disappearances” of the non-Aryan “Untermenschen,” mentioned above, was orchestrated with conscienceless bureaucratic efficiency.
Bishops, priests and pastors, most of whom had taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler, told their parishioners that it was their Christian duty to join the military and fight and kill for the Fuhrer.
Resentment also played an important role in the swastika-waving terror. Most of the street-fighting militias loyal to the Nazi party’s politics were WWI veterans who had been rendered unemployable by years of horrific trench warfare experiences.
They were justifiably angry about their joblessness, poverty, physical disabilities, mental ill health, traumatic brain injuries, hunger, all worsened by the hyperinflation and impoverishment that go hand in hand with the huge costs of having standing armies and fighting perpetual wars.
Many of these unemployed veterans rushed to join the militia groups for the food, shelter and camaraderie, perhaps not realizing that they were helping to create the chaos that would destroy the liberal democratic Weimar republic, an action that would lead the world into another world war that would ultimately turn out to be suicidal for Germany.
Most German churches cooperated with, or at least did not vocally oppose, Hitler’s agenda. Pastors cheered the Fuhrer from swastika-draped pulpits or they stood by silently as the concentration camps and prisons filled with those suspected by the Gestapo of not being supportive of the regime.
All efforts to resist came too late, for the people who objected to the dictatorship were leaderless and unschooled in any nonviolent resistance actions. They had no Gandhi or Martin Luther King and were totally unprepared to act en masse.
Blessed Wars
Though Hitler’s Nazi regime represented an exceptional form of horror in the industrialized slaughter committed during the Holocaust and related mass killings, it must be acknowledged that other countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions that have destroyed other populations and cultures, often with the blessings of religious leaders.
In the last two decades, the two Bush administrations mounted wars in the Persian Gulf region that had the consent (or acquiescence) of the majority of U.S. church leaders, with prayers from Billy Graham in the White House the night before the invasions began.
Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars.
Only four American Catholic bishops voted in opposition to Bush the Elder’s Gulf War I (at an annual conference of U.S. Catholic bishops). In Gulf War II, Pope John Paul II declared that the war was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but most American Catholic leaders and parishioners ignored the pontiff’s warnings and supported the war. Most American Protestants did the same.
Yet, General Schwartzkopf and both Presidents Bush are in “good” company when it comes to believing that God is on their side in war. All U.S. presidents and presidential candidates in recent memory, even President Obama, end their speeches with “May God Bless the United States of America,” the equivalent of the German military’s “Gott Mit Uns.”
My Veterans for Peace friends are of the opinion that modern war amounts to legally sanctioned, highly organized mass murder and that basic training is psychological rape with serious, often permanent consequences for everybody involved: the victims, bystanders and maybe especially the soldiers.
And today, the killing is not just done by soldiers on the ground who can see the “whites of their eyes.” War is now often done from a safe distance by the high-tech “soldiering” of high-altitude bombing, supersonic jet fighters, long-range missiles (many of them computer-guided from unmanned drones), and radioactive DU armor-piercing ordnance that will continue killing for many centuries into the future.
The victims of this kind of lopsided modern warfare (for which the human targets have no defense) regard these tactics as cowardly acts.
Bureaucracies of Death
These days, wars are started and perpetuated by a huge conglomeration of war profiteers: corporations (and their lobbyists), government bureaucracies (that obediently follow orders from above), the handlers of pro-war politicians and the financial underwriters of their campaigns, the ruling class, and the Department of War/Defense which has, as job # 1, the planning and orchestrating of current and future military conflicts, whether originating from real, imaginary or invented threats.
A major unasked question is “what should be the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in the starting and perpetuation of politically motivated wars?”
If war-makers mix religion and politics by invoking God’s blessings on the cannons and the cannon fodder, shouldn’t the churches, which are supposed to be the consciences of the nation, apply core Christian ethical principles to the war question and refuse to cooperate with the slaughter of fellow children of God?
Sadly, for the past 1,700 years, Christian churches have not done so. They have largely failed in their moral obligation to teach and live the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.
One only has to read the gruesome history of the many “holy wars” and atrocities committed in the history of Christendom, including the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the various genocides including the Nazi Holocaust.
While the churches have played key roles in the promotion and cover-ups of these brutalities, the churches have not been alone. Whitewashes and excuses have often come from politicians, pundits, “embedded” journalists and co-opted history-writers, especially the authors of high school textbooks.
Recall how, when military spokesmen try to explain away the deaths of non-combatants in these wars, they invoke the term “collateral damage” (the euphemism for the unintended killing and maiming of innocents in wartime) and quickly dismiss those deaths by spouting the unconvincing phrase that Schwartzkopf and all other apologists for war use: “we regret the loss of innocent life.”
And they piously mouth these equally insincere words: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The same rote phraseology too often comes from the lips of religious leaders.
Christ’s Teachings
How can the legalized mass slaughter of war, often progressing to the point of genocide, be a part of a Christian tradition that started out with a small group of inspired, oppressed and impoverished peasants who were trying to live by the highly ethical, nonviolent teachings of their pacifist leader?
Interestingly, the active pacifism of the early Christian church did prove to be successful – and even practical. During the first few centuries of Christianity, enmity and eye-for-an-eye retaliation were rejected. The Golden Rule and the refusal to kill the enemy were actually taught in the church.
Gospel non-violence was the norm, so the professed enemies of those communities of faith were not provoked to retaliation because there was nothing against which to retaliate. Rather, enemies were befriended, prayed for, fed, nourished and embraced as neighbors – potential friends who needed understanding and mercy.
The church survived the persecutions of those early years and thrived, largely because of its commitment to the nonviolence of Jesus. It was not until the church was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th Century that power and wealth changed the priorities of church leaders.
Today however, it is obvious that the vast majority of professed Christians have been misled, intentionally or unintentionally, into believing that they can immerse themselves in un-Christ-like realities like war and killing and somehow still be following the gentle Jesus.
Today, American Christianity is at risk of going the way of the pro-war “Christianity” of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, which may in the long run discredit the faith much the way Christianity lost credibility among many Germans because their churches and church leaders facilitated those destructive wars.
The vast majority of Germans before World War II were baptized members of a Christian church, but since WWII ended church membership has fallen sharply and the number of Germans attending weekly worship services is now estimated to be in the single digits.
The psychological and spiritual wounding of the soldiers and their families in the two world wars stripped the German churches of their moral standing.
Those PTSD-afflicted ex-church-going combat veterans who lost their faith in the wars, along with their traumatized families, found out much too late that they had not been warned by the very institutions that theoretically should have courageously and faithfully taken on the heavy responsibility to teach private and public morality.
Many Germans who survived the wars felt betrayed by their churches and therefore had no inclination to try to reclaim their lost faith. The churches sank toward irrelevancy.
The world would have been far better off if the Christian leaders of the world had been faithful to the ethical teachings of the gospels and quit making blasphemous appeals to God on behalf of war, whether with those “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles or the “God Bless America” political sloganeering.
21,000 Home Pools Water Slides Are Being Recalled After Death of a Young Colorado Mother
A 29-year-old Colorado mother died in Andover, Mass. after fracturing her neck going down a Banzai in-ground pool water slide which had been placed over the concrete edge of a pool. The woman hit her head at the bottom of the slide because it had partially deflated.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., of Bentonville, Ark. and Toys R Us Inc., of Wayne, NJ, in cooperation with The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), are announcing a recall of about 21,000 inflatable Banzai in-ground pool water slides.
Read more.
Toxic Substances from Everyday Life Are Slipping Through Treatment Plants
A federal study released May 8, 2012 found more than 100 toxic substances from everyday life are making their way through wastewater treatment plants into the Columbia River.
Jennifer Morace, the U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who was lead investigator on the study, said: “This links it back to what we do in our everyday lives, what goes down the drain and to the wastewater treatment plant, and the fact they were not designed to remove the new or emerging contaminants.”
A total of 112 toxic materials were found, 53 percent of those that were tested for, including flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, personal care products, mercury and cleaning products.
Vermont Ponders Fracking Ban
Vermont is about to become the first U.S. state to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.
Fracking extracts natural gas by injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into shale rock formations to fracture the rock and release the gas. Giant holding ponds or tanks are needed to store the chemically contaminated waste water that comes back up the hole after wells have been fractured.
The Vermont House of Representatives voted 103-36 Friday to approve a conference committee report calling for the ban. The report reconciles differences with a bill banning the practice passed by the state Senate last week.
The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, who is expected to sign it into law.
“We don’t want to be shooting chemicals into our groundwater in pursuit of gas that does not exist,” Governor Shumlin said Friday after the House vote.
Read the Full Story on the Environmental News Service Website.
A Few Things You Should Know about Chlorine
by Pure Water Annie
Chlorine has saved some lives and it has taken some.
Adapted from articles originally published in the Pure Water Occasional for January, 2012.
Chlorine is a big part of our lives. It has hundreds of uses in addition to water treatment, but water is where most of us encounter it most frequently and most intimately.
Chlorine (or its near relative chloramine, which we’ll discuss more fully later) is added to most public and many private water supplies to eliminate problems with bacteria, viruses, fungi, and algae. It is also used as an oxidant to aid in the treatment of such well problems as iron, manganese, and hydrogen sulfide.
Chlorine is a powerful germicide. It kills or reduces most disease-causing water contaminants to non-detectable levels. It also eliminates algae and mold that are problems for municipal water systems.
Chlorine, along with improved sanitation, is responsible for the virtual elimination in the US of such serious waterborne diseases as cholera, dysentery and typhoid. Waterborne ailments have not been erased by chlorination by any means, but the problem is minute compared to what it was before chlorination was used.
Lack of clean drinking water and adequate sewage systems is the main health problem in most of the under-developed world.
The effectiveness of chlorine as a disinfectant can depend on a variety of water variables. These include contact time (how long the chlorine remains in the water to do its work), the concentration of chlorine, and the pH, temperature, and turbidity level of the water.
Chlorine remains the disinfectant of choice for municipal suppliers largely because of its price. As compared with other forms of disinfection, such as ultraviolet, ozone, and hydrogen peroxide, it is cost effective. It is also the disinfectant of choice because of its residual effect: Chlorine (and chloramine to an even greater degree) stays in the water and continues to protect against micro-organisms, while UV and Ozone kill on contact but offer little if any “residual” protection. UV works great on wells, and it aids in the treatment program of many cities, but is not often used as the principal disinfectant.
Another problem with chlorine is that when it combines with organic substances in water it creates a group of spin-off chemicals called, variously, THMs (trihalomethanes) or DBPs (disinfection by-products). The full scope of the problems with DBPs is not known, but of the hundreds of chemicals that have been identified, some are known cancer causers and are regulated by the EPA.
Because of the DPB issue (and other issues, like the relatively shorter life-span of chlorine) water suppliers are in greater numbers switching to chloramines, a mixture of chlorine and ammonia, as the disinfectant for public water supplies.
The risks of cancer from contacting and ingesting chlorinated water have been downplayed by public health officials because the alternative of non-treatment is so much more dangerous. The World Health Organization has said that “the risk of death from pathogens is at least 100 to1,000 times greater than the risk of cancer from disinfection by-products (DBPs), and the risk of illness from pathogens is at least 10,000 to one million times greater than the risk of cancer from DBPs.”
The best and most practical method for removing chlorine (and chloramine) from tap water entering the home is carbon filtration. There are many subtleties involved in carbon filtration. Variables like pH, water temperature, flow rate, “mesh” size, arrangement of the carbon, and others can greatly affect carbon’s effectiveness, but the truth is that almost any carbon filter, including the cheap, end-of-faucet units, will do a decent job of chlorine (but not chloramine) reduction from drinking water. (Shower filters, which must handle a much larger volume of water at a higher flow rate, most often are made with KDF rather than carbon.)
Reduction of chloramine is a much more complex process, but the urban legend that says that standard carbon water filters won’t remove chloramine is false. Chloramines can be reduced by carbon, but more residence time is needed—a lot more. Some carbons are more effective with chloramines than others, and the very best, by far, is specially processed “catalytic” carbon.
A Sensible Home Treatment Strategy for Chlorine and Chloramines
The disinfectants in city water are there for a reason. They protect against pathogens. They should be in the water until it reaches your home, but at that point they become a problem rather than an asset. The problems are bad taste, chemical toxicity (which affects some more than others), and serious health issues involving both the disinfectant and its by products.
If your goal is simply to produce better tasting water by removing the taste of chlorine, a simple end-of-faucet filter will do.
If you want improved taste plus protection from chemicals (including DBPs), a serious carbon block filter is needed. The more carbon the better, and the higher the filter quality the better. DBPs are not effectively reduced by small end-of-faucet filters. Treating them requires more contact time and a larger and better carbon-based filtration system.. Multi-stage carbon filters are excellent. Virtually all undersink reverse osmosis units remove chlorine, chloramine, and DBPs easily.
For whole house treatment, a small carbon filter will remove chlorine, but a much larger filter, or a fairly large filter that uses catalytic carbon, is needed for chloramine.
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Numerical Wizard B. Bea Sharper ferrets out the watery facts that Harper’s misses |
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Rank of contaminated drinking water on the World Bank’s 1992 list of preventable environmental hazards — 1
Number of people in the underdeveloped world that lack clean drinking water — 1 billion.
Number of people in the underdeveloped world that lack adequate sewage systems — almost 2 billion.
Parts per million chlorine of common household bleach – 52,500.
Year in which US water utilities began treating water with chlorine — 1908.
Percentage of US water utilities that now use chlorine or its derivatives to disinfect drinking water – 98%.
Year when chloramine was first used to treat water – 1916.
Percentage of US municipalities that now use chloramine as a disinfectant by EPA count – 30%.
Why Hospitals Overcharge the Uninsured
By Kari Lydersen
July 23, 2003
Editor’s Note: Did you ever suspect that after you fork over $1,000 for your “20% co-pay” share of the hospital tab, the insurance company doesn’t really have to come up with $4,000 to pay the remainder? Well, you were right. This piece reveals one of the many dirty little secrets of the hospital and insurance industries. Another little secret that most people don’t ever think through is that with the intricate web of inter-ownership, the hospitals, the pharmaceuticals interests and the insurance companies are owned largely by the same bunch of rich guys. If you’ll think through this, you’ll understand that when the insurance company weeps bitter tears about the high medical and drug costs it must bear, it isn’t telling you that it pays for these items at a fraction of the stated price, nor is it telling you that “paying” really means taking money from one pocket and putting it into the other. –Hardly Waite, Pure Water Gazette.
Rose Shaffer is a homecare nurse and grandmother of seven who lives on Chicago’s south side. Though she spends all day caring for the health of others, her job doesn’t provide her with health insurance.
Advocate is one of the largest chains of hospitals in Illinois, with 10 hospitals in the Cook County area and profits of $108 million in 2001.
But Shaffer — and millions like her around the country — are actually subsidizing Advocate and other major hospitals, according to a report recently released by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). That’s because the approximately 41.2 million Americans who don’t have health insurance today not only have to pay astronomically high healthcare bills out of their own pockets, but they actually pay around 50 to 70 percent more than insurance companies do for health coverage.
When an insurance carrier foots a hospital bill, the company “negotiates” a price with the hospital that is usually about half the original billing price. Yet when an individual without insurance is forced to pay for healthcare, they don’t have this bargaining power. So they end up paying the “full” rates, making up the slack for the deals the insurance companies have gotten (as well as the uninsured individuals who never pay their bills).
“If you look at it from the insurance company’s perspective, they are a big group who can make a deal with the hospital,” said Marianne McMullen, communications director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Hospital Accountability Project, a relatively new initiative aimed at linking workers’ and patients’ rights. “But from the perspective of the uninsured, it’s really gross. The hospitals are making their biggest profit off them.”
The full rates uninsured people end up paying are usually vastly inflated from the actual cost of providing service. For the past 20 years healthcare bills have risen at twice the inflation rate. In 1993 the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that 99 percent of hospital bills have overcharges, which can include “phantom charges” for services that weren’t actually given, markups, duplicate billings and charges for unnecessarily long hospital stays or unneeded services.
Hospital administrators argue that many uninsured individuals never pay their bills, so hospitals have to keep costs high to avoid losing money. But that doesn’t make it any easier for those who do pay. And most hospitals don’t just write off the unpaid bills. It is common practice for hospitals to sue patients for tens of thousands of dollars, money they often just don’t have. After Shaffer had a major heart attack in October 2000, she couldn’t pay the bills. She noted that even though she told her doctors she didn’t have insurance, she was never given available financial aid forms to fill out for her treatment.
So Advocate South Suburban Hospital where she was treated sued her for the amount of her bill — $17,760. Never mind that if Shaffer had had health insurance, the company would only have been billed about $8,500. Shaffer said she could have handled the $8,500. But coming up with over $17,000 was impossible. So she put her house in foreclosure and declared bankruptcy. Meanwhile the stress this has caused isn’t helping her health any.
“I’m grateful to the hospital for the care I received — they saved my life,” Shaffer said. “But now they are trying to take it away from me again.”
A study by the SEIU project found that at Advocate hospitals in Cook County, Illinois, uninsured residents like Shaffer were charged an average 139 percent more than the charge insurance companies ended up paying for the same services. That equals out to $13,854 compared to $5,805 on average for inpatient services — funds an average uninsured person can hardly spare. This amounted to a total gap of $58 million between charges for the insured and uninsured at Advocate hospitals in 2001, the SEIU said.
McMullen said that while virtually all hospitals overcharge the uninsured, Advocate is the current target of the overpricing campaign because they have the area’s highest average charges for uninsured people and also because they are a non-profit, religiously affiliated chain which is supposed to have the mission of helping the needy. Advocate is affiliated with the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. In 2001, the SEIU report says, Advocate made an $8,460 profit on the uninsured patients who paid their full bills.
“This just incredibly wrong,” said Toure Muhammad, communications director for the SEIU. “Advocate is a religiously sponsored non-profit institution that is getting tax breaks that the community pays for.”
Advocate spokesman Ed Domansky said that Advocate’s billing practices are mandated by federal law, as are the billing structures of all hospitals. He thinks the SEIU is singling out Advocate since they are trying to unionize the hospitals, in what has turned into an extremely contentious campaign.
“They’re exploiting the uninsured with this study and they’re singling out Advocate because they want to unionize,” he said. “It’s pretty clear what this is about. It’s just another tactic they’re using to mislead the public.” He added that Advocate has “one of the most generous charity care programs in the country.”
The SEIU alleges that overcharging also allows non-profit hospitals like Advocate to inflate the amount of charity care they provide — Advocate claimed to provide $32.7 million in charity care in 2001, but the SEIU pegged the true cost of the care at only $12.7 million.
Members of the SEIU project hope that by drawing attention to Advocate’s practices, hospitals around the country will be forced to change their ways. Already, McMullen noted, two national for-profit hospital chains — Columbia HCA and Tenet — have promised to stop charging more to uninsured patients. In response, Domansky said, “Whatever the SEIU has pressured Columbia HCA and Tenet into doing, they will find that the federal government doesn’t allow them to use that pricing structure because it hasn’t yet been improved.”
Meanwhile between the tough job market and the rising costs of coverage for employers, the number of uninsured in the country is likely to keep rising. While the ranks of the uninsured include the unemployed and homeless, the majority of uninsured people are employed, working everything from service industry and blue collar jobs to professional jobs with temporary agencies, small businesses or non-profit organizations. Minorities are also more likely to lack health insurance, as are immigrants. For example in Illinois 28.9 percent of Latinos and 22.8 percent of African-Americans are uninsured, compared to 11 percent of whites.
In June the Hospital Accountability Project held a widely attended Town Hall meeting in Chicago on the topic of overcharging, and they have staged numerous protests outside Advocate hospitals as well as advocating on the behalf of individual patients.
They hope a victory in ending or reducing the overcharging of uninsured people will aid both low income people in general and health care workers themselves — workers who ironically are themselves often uninsured or underinsured. The Hospital Accountability Project also plans to undertake other campaigns linking the rights of workers and patients, noting that healthcare workers’ rights are inextricably linked to patient safety and vice versa.
Already the SEIU is on the verge of winning passage of Illinois state legislation that requires hospitals to make public their staffing levels, infection rates and other crucial data, which can both help people choose what hospital to go to based on these indicators of quality of care, and help unions fight against understaffing and other workplace issues. Legislation that is similar, though not as comprehensive, already exists in Wisconsin and California and is in the works in other states.
“We’re working on behalf of the patients, workers and the community in which [the hospitals] operate,” said McMullen. “Unions usually just work on the behalf of employees, but here we’re working on behalf of the whole community. It’s part of the new direction unions have to go in.”
New Information Supports Hormesis and Challenges the Ways that Regulators Determine Risks
Posted May 8th, 2012
UMass Amherst Scientist Says New Study Challenges How Regulators Determine Risk
Dec. 21, 2006
AMHERST, Mass. – A new study of a large U.S. National Cancer Institute database provides the strongest evidence yet that a key portion of the traditional dose-response model used in drug testing and risk assessment for toxins is wrong when it comes to measuring the effects of very low doses, says Edward J. Calabrese, a scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The findings, based on a review of more than 56,000 tests in 13 strains of yeast using 2,200 drugs, are published in the journal Toxicological Sciences and offer strong backing for the theory of hormesis, Calabrese and his colleagues contend.
Calabrese says the size of the new study and the preponderance of evidence supporting hormesis, a dose-response phenomenon in which low doses have the opposite effect of high doses, is a breakthrough that should help scientists assess and predict risks from new drugs, toxicants and possibly carcinogens. Calabrese says, “This is a fundamental biological principle that has been missed.”
Calabrese says that the field of toxicology got the dose response wrong in the 1930s and this mistake has infiltrated all regulations for low-dose exposures for toxic chemicals and drugs. These low-dose effects can be beneficial or harmful, something that the regulations miss because they are currently based on high-dose testing schemes that differ greatly from the conditions of human exposures.
In this latest study, which uses data from a large and highly standardized National Cancer Institute tumor-drug screening database, Calabrese says the evidence of hormesis is overwhelming. In the study, high doses of anticancer drugs frequently inhibit yeast growth, but at low doses they enhance growth, exactly what the homesis model predicts.
Whether one accepts the hormesis theory is not the critical public policy issue, according to Calabrese. He says that the major issue is that the risk assessments models used by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration fail to accurately predict responses in the low-dose zone, that is, where people live most of their daily lives.
Calabrese also says challenging the existing dose-response model has profound public policy and health implications. “I believe the hormesis model is the fundamental dose-response and government testing and risk assessment procedures should reflect that,” Calabrese says. For example, in environmental regulations, it has been assumed that most carcinogens possess real or theoretical risks at low levels, and therefore must be nearly completely removed from the environments to assure public safety. Some would contend that if hormesis is the correct model for very low levels, that cleanup standards may have to be significantly changed. Others, however, see the evidence as insufficient for such radical change and worry about other factors that can influence the effects of chemicals in low doses. The new study promises to add fuel to the debate, Calabrese says.
Calabrese also suggests that the findings may have important implications for the pharmaceutical industry and medical practices. He says that hormesis is likely to identify new life-saving drugs that were missed through traditional testing and to markedly improve the accuracy of patient dosing, which will not only improve health outcomes but also reduce adverse side effects.
Go Here for the complete article from the Toxicological Sciences journal.
