Dr. Mercola Reports on Yet Another Study Indicating That

the US Is A Backward Country

According to the popular mercola.com website, fluoride is in 2012 still being added to 70 percent of public drinking water supplies in the US ostensibly as a cavity preventer.

According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, “This benefit is dubious at best, as there is practically no difference in tooth decay rates between fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries, and no difference between states that fluoridate a high versus low percentage of their water.

“Yet, while fluoride in drinking water does NOT decrease rates of tooth decay, numerous studies show that this chemical has a wide array of devastating health effects – one of them being lowered IQ.”

A review of brain studies involving the use of fluoride has concluded that one of the adverse effects of fluoride exposure on children is damage to their neurological development.  According to the Harvard researchers, children who lived in high-fluoride areas had “significantly lower IQ than those in low fluoride areas,” with the authors noting: ” The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment.“

This adds to the mounting evidence demonstrating the damage fluoride inflicts on your brain, including your pineal gland. The results of one study looking at children’s intelligence in two towns – one with fluoridated water and one without – were particularly revealing, with about 28 percent of the children in the low-fluoride area scoring as “bright, normal or higher intelligence” compared to only 8 percent in the high-fluoride area.

Further, 15 percent of children in the high-fluoride city had signs of mental retardation, compared with only 6 percent in the low-fluoride city. And the study even accounted for other potential variables, such as lead exposure, iodine deficiency or a history of brain disease or head injury. There have been over 23 human studies and 100 animal studies linking fluoride to brain damage.

Read Dr. Mercola’s full account.

How to Keep Your Well Healthy

 

by Chris Carl

Reprinted from Care2.

Gazette Introductory Note:  This excellent overview of water well health is reprinted as a service to our readers.  The author points out basics that every well owner should be aware of.  Well owners have a responsibilty to themselves and to others.  When you punch a hole down to the water table, you open an avenue for contaminants to enter the ground water.  –-Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor. 

“Wellhead protection, whether a dug well or artesian, is a top priority in having a healthy well,” said Bart Cushing, owner of Cushing & Sons Dependable Water Wells in Keene, New Hampshire. “Wellhead protection will also solve about eighty percent of any problems you might run into as well,” he added. In the past few decades, wells have gone from being dug two to three feet wide to the more modern six-inch inch width and are primarily artesian and capped with cement.

Your first consideration when contemplating a well on your property is finding a well drilling business that has experience and references. Cushing said that people sometimes think they are saving money by hiring a contractor who is inexpensive and uses cheap, possibly hazardous materials. “I’ve had a lot of business during the recession fixing a lot of these mistakes,” said Cushing.

Once you’ve hired a reputable company you will need to consider:

*Where is the ground water?

*Is the proposed well away from sources of contamination?

*Is the location convenient to power and the building being supplied with water?

*Is the location assessable for drilling and pump installation?

Protecting your well from contaminants

Cushing advised having your well tested at least once a year, suggesting the late spring as the best time to test as that is when there is the most run-off from melting snow.

Cushing said he has been very surprised over the years regarding some of the things people don’t understand about keeping the water in their well healthy. “For example, if gasoline is spilled within one hundred feet of a well and there is enough of a gradient, sure enough, there will be petro chemicals in your well,” said Cushing. Though he added the chemicals could take two to three days to seep into the well.

 Atrazine Is Still Widely Used in The US

The herbicide atrazine is a fairly common ingredient of city tap water in the United States.  Atrazine is banned in the European Union,  but corporate-friendly US regulating agencies still allow it to be used.

Atrazine is one of the regulated chemicals that cities have most difficulty keeping within the EPA required limits.

The Huffington Post recently reported that  the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to notify the public about data showing that atrazine has been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states. Atrazine has been studied for its potential link to breast cancer, prostate cancer, and birth defects, and the EPA considers it to be a potential endocrine disruptor.

Removing atrazine is a costly undertaking for cities, requiring expensive carbon filtration equipment.  To recover the cost of filtering atrazine, water companies in six states are preparing a lawsuit against the makers of atrazine, the Swiss company Syngenta.  (Lots of luck.)

The case of atrazine and other herbicides clearly underlines the need for point of use treatment.  Atrazine can be removed with relative ease with a high quality carbon drinking water filter, but it is very expensive for city water suppliers to provide high quality carbon filtration for water that is going to flush toilets and water golf courses.

More on city water chemicals from the Huffington Post

 

U.S. Lags Behind China and India, Ranking Third in Overall Water Consumption

A New Study Has Found that Wastewater Disposal Is the Main Danger From Fracking

Scientists at Stony Brook University in an August 2012 article in the journal Risk Analysis asserted that future research into problems involved with the controversial oil/gas recovery practice commonly known as “fracking” will focus mainly on wastewater disposal.  That is because even in the best cases at least 200 cubic meters (over 50,000 gallons) of contaminated water is released from every treated well.

Waste water from fracking presents risks from salts and radioactive materials that are “several orders of magnitude larger” than for other potential water pollution possibilities examined in the study. Other water pollution pathways studied include tanker truck spills, well casing failures,  accidental drill site fluid spills,  and retention tank failures.  The fracking wastewater disposal risks, the study found, “dwarf the other water risks.”

The enormity of the risk that fracking entails can be seen in this assessment:

If only 10 percent of the Marcellus Shale region was developed, that could equate to 40,000 wells. Under the best-case median risk calculation that Rozell and Reaven [authors of the study] developed, the volume of contaminated wastewater “would equate to several hours flow of the Hudson River or a few thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools.” That represents a “potential substantial risk” that suggests additional steps should be taken to lower the potential for contaminated fracking fluid release, the authors say. Specifically, they suggest that “regulators should explore the option of mandating alternative fracturing procedures and methods to reduce the wastewater usage and contamination from shale gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale.” These would include various alternatives such as nitrogen-based or liquefied petroleum gas fracturing methods that would substantially reduce the amount of wastewater generated.

More information on the dangers of wastewater produced by fracking from the Wall Street Journal.

EPA Is Providing Funds to Reduce Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico

In 2012 the EPA issued a  grant to the  Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority for the purpose of combating hypoxia.

A large area in the northern  Gulf of Mexico is called the “dead zone.”  The problem is known technically as hypoxia.
Hypoxia means low oxygen and is primarily a problem in coastal waters. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is an area of hypoxic waters at the mouth of the

Mississippi River. Its area varies in size, but can cover up to 6,000 to 7,000 square miles.  The dead zone is caused by nutrient enrichment from the Mississippi River, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous.

Hypoxic waters have dissolved oxygen concentrations of less than 2-3 ppm. Hypoxia can be caused by a variety of factors, including excess nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, which promote growth of algae. As dead algae decompose, oxygen is consumed in the process, resulting in low levels of oxygen in the water.

Nutrients can come from many sources, including any of the following:

• Fertilizers from agriculture, golf courses, and suburban lawns
• Erosion of soil full of nutrients
• Discharges from sewage treatment plants
• Deposition of atmospheric nitrogen

More from the EPA’s Website.

High Levels of Lead Have Been Found in Half the Garden Hoses Tested

An admonition from the National Gardening Association:

A common summer scene involves kids squirting each other with the garden hose. Invariably, on a hot summer day some of the kids will take a drink from the hose. We’ve all done it, whether as kids or adults. It turns out that drinking from a plastic hose may be hazardous to our health.

Lab tests conducted on water left sitting for a day in 10 common brands of garden hoses revealed that 5 out of the 10 hoses had lead levels higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe levels for drinking water. Despite a mandate for manufacturers to significantly reduce lead levels in hoses by July 31st, it appears there are still brands with excessive lead leaching into the water.

You can avoid lead hoses entirely by purchasing hoses sold for boats or RVs, which don’t contain lead. Flush out any hose before using it, and avoid hoses with brass fittings, which also contain lead.

Similarly,  Consumer Reports tested 16 hoses.  Four of the 16 were labelled “safe for drinking” and did, in fact, contain no more lead after water had stood in them for several hours than was found in water coming straight from the tap.  The remaining hoses, some labelled unsafe for drinking and others not labelled, contained lead, the worst 10 to 100 times the EPA allowable for lead in drinking water (15 ppb).

The issue is that many hoses are made of polyvinyl chloride, which uses lead as a stabilizer, and when water stands in the hose over a period of time water picks up lead from the hose materials.

The moral:  If you’re going to drink from a garden hose or use it in any other way that matters (e. g., watering your garden or filling your fish pond), buy a hose that’s intended to be safe for drinking water.  It’s true there are garden hose filters that remove lead, but it makes a lot more sense to pay a few dollars more up front for a lead-free hose  than to put lead in the water then filter it out.

 

Despite Drought Conditions in Many Parts of the World, Flooding is Causing Devastation Elsewhere

Voice of America reports that more than 50,000 people in North Korea do not have access to clean drinking water after floods contaminated many wells with sewage.  It is likely that food shortages will be made worse by the flooding as well.

Likewise, monsoon conditions in Beijing and flooding in Philadelphia are creating severe problems in both cities.

 

See The Stream for more details of flooding worldwide.

The U.S. Geological Survey Has Found Ancient Groundwater Under Maryland

Some of the water under Maryland is older than a million years, the first such ancient groundwater found along the Atlantic Coast, the U.S. Geological Survey reports. There are relatively few aquifers in the world in which million-year-old groundwater has been documented  These include the Nubian aquifer in the Sahara Desert, Canada’s Alberta Basin, and the Great Artesian Basin in Australia.  The ancient water under Maryland resides in the Patapsco aquifer.

The Maryland aquifer provides freshwater for the region east of Washington and Baltimore. Modern-day pumping rates have lowered water pressures and changed water chemistry, affecting the aquifer’s ability to provide freshwater for drinking and other uses. Concerns over saltwater intrusion in some areas have led water managers to increasingly move groundwater production from shallower aquifers to the deeper upper Patapsco aquifer, which has caused groundwater levels to decline.

The USGS has a “groundwater watch” database containing records from about 850,000 U.S. wells over the past 100 years.

 

More from USA Today

August 3 is National Garden Hose Day

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor

Everyone knows that Leonardo Da Vinci invented the lawn mower and Pure Water Annie invented the water softener, but information about the origins of one of the world’s most useful devices, the humble water hose, is hard to come by.

Here is one theory, from an article by Marion Owen:

The year is 1652.
The place: Amsterdam.

A 12-year old boy, named Jan Van der Heiden, watches in awe as the city’s town hall burns to the ground. The event makes a lasting impression.

Twenty years pass. Van der Heiden and a group of men, standing on ladders along a canal, fill a watersack which is supported in a trestle, with buckets. From the trestle, water flows in a linen hose down to the fire engine tank below. And the first fire hose is born.

The linen hoses are soon replaced by leather, which are hand-stitched, a trade that was common in Holland’s seafaring industry. It isn’t long, though before more uses are found for Van der Heiden’s invention and the first garden hose is born.

There is also talk that in the pre-Christian era,  as early as 400 BC, people were using animal intestines as primitive hoses to move water about. There is no mention of garden hoses in the Bible. I have a theory that hollowed out snakes were also among the early hoses, but these may not have been widely used until the late Middle Ages.

What is certain is that by the nineteenth century, water hoses were in use. The “hose bath” was a popular item in pre-Civil War Water Cure facilities, as indicated by this 19th century magazine picture:

When uses of the hose are discussed,  the fire hose usually tops the list, and it’s true that fire fighters’ effectiveness increased exponentially when they gained the ability to get water from Place A (the water source) to Place B (the fire) without having to resort to the bucket brigade.

The common garden hose is one of those things we take for granted.  The hose is pretty amazing, though, when you think of it for what it is–a very inexpensive portable pipe that can bend around corners, roll up for storage,  and carry high volumes of water quickly over great distances.

The only thing better than a garden hose is a garden hose with a filter.