Study: showering boosts concentrations of potentially hazardous trihalomethanes

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

May 2, 2002

CHAPEL HILL — Trihalomethanes — byproducts of interaction between chlorine used to disinfect water and organic matter found in raw water — increase significantly in the bloodstream after showering, a new study shows. Public health experts suspect the chemicals may boost the risk of cancer and contribute to reproductive problems such as miscarriage.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, involved 50 women living in Georgia and Texas. It showed that showering shifted the distribution of trihalomethanes (THMs) in blood toward that found in the tap water in volunteers’ houses.

Another finding was that the distribution of trihalomethane species — there are four chlorinated and brominated forms — detected in the women’s blood reflected differences of type and concentration in their respective local tap water.

A report on the research appeared in April in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Primary authors are Amy M. Miles, a former public health graduate student at UNC and now an environmental engineer at Research Triangle Institute, and Dr. Philip C. Singer, professor of environmental sciences and engineering at UNC.

“Chlorination of tap water was one of the most important improvements made in public health, and it saves countless lives each year by reducing risk from bacterial contamination,” Miles said. “Water-borne diseases used to be a major cause of death and illness, and they still are in some parts of the world without chlorination.”

Despite its obvious benefits, if chlorination creates its own lesser but significant risks, as many scientists believe, it needs to be studied further, she said. Many water treatment plants are switching to alternative disinfectants to reduce trihalomethane concentrations in drinking water.

The new study aimed to evaluate whether health workers could use drinking water concentrations of THM to predict concentrations in people’s blood, Miles said.

Researchers picked Corpus Christi, Texas, and Cobb County, Ga., to investigate, she said. That’s because water supplies in the former showed moderately high levels of chloroform, the most highly chlorinated THM, and, in the latter, lower total THM concentrations but a higher proportion of brominated species, which are believed to be potentially more hazardous.

Through blood sample analysis, researchers measured THMs in the blood of 25 women at each site before and soon after they showered and compared those levels to concentrations found in tap water at their houses.

“Concentrations of THMs were about 1,000 times lower in blood than in tap water, but after the showers, median levels in blood increased by a factor of four,” Miles said. “This showed THMs were getting into the blood as a result of water use. It could not address, however, whether the concentrations were harmful or were linked to any particular health problem.”

Future studies by Singer and colleagues will examine various trihalomethane exposures more closely, including those caused by inhaling the compounds from air inside houses, she said.

Report co-authors are Drs. David L. Ashley and Michele C. Lynberg of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pauline Mendola of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Peter H. Langlois of the Texas Department of Health and J.R. Nuckols of Colorado State University.

Support for the research came from the American Water Works Association Research Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the EPA.

Fair Use Policy

Why the War Against Pot? 

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor

Have you ever wondered why the United States spends vast piles of money and squanders immeasurable amounts of human talent and natural resources in the effort to combat a benign substance like marijuana?

Have you wondered why the US is now the only industrialized country to criminalize a substance that is obviously far less harmful than the majority of legally sold pharmaceuticals?

Kate Silver, writing in the Nov. 13, 2001 Las Vegas Weekly, has some answers.

In case you haven’t guessed, like everything else in the USA, it has to do with money. It has a lot to do with the end of the Cold War, Silver says.  When the Cold War ended, ” enormous needs for certain technology and personnel were eradicated. Once America declared its infamous War on Drugs, those needs were refilled.” It provided a new “enemy” and thus created a vast number of new government jobs and a major new source of technological endeavors to be managed by government bureaucrats. It turned the Cold War inward and allowed us to wage war on our own people at a tidy profit. Silver also points out that as a very nice side-effect,  “many powerful Political Action Committees donate money to campaigns to push their own agenda, keeping marijuana illegal.”

The toll of this war is, of course, enormous in terms of  “jobs, relationships, money and time lost for the crime of smoking a joint.”  Marijuana arrests take a lot of manpower and a lot of time. “In 2000, police arrested 734,498 people for marijuana violations–the highest ever recorded by the FBI. Of those, 88 percent were for possession. The remaining 88,456 were charged with sale/manufacture.”

You probably have noticed that government officials long ago gave up trying to justify the War on Dope with anything resembling logic.  Pot has just been added to the ever-growing list of “enemies” we’re expected to fight without asking why.

Silver concludes: “Las Vegas Weekly contacted a police source in hopes of getting an argument against legalization, and providing a semblance of balance. Sadly enough, the only reasoning the source could give for pot being illegal is, well, because it’s illegal.”

Bee Bea Sharper on Drugs

Year of the passage of the Harrison Tax Act, which started the U. S. “War on Drugs”: 1914

Year in which the non-medical sale or possession of marijuana was made illegal in the U.S.: 1937.

Year of the Nixon Administration’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act, which begins the current era of drug-related legislation: 1970.

According to Nixon, drug abuse was “America’s public enemy number: one.”

Amount spent on the Drug War by the Nixon Administration in 1969: $65,000,000.

Amount spent on the Drug War by the Clinton Administration in 1999: $17,700,000,000.

Percentage of high school seniors who in 1999 said they could find marijuana “fairly easily”: 88.9%

The total number of Americans behind bars in 1970: 200,000.

The total number of Americans serving time for non-violent drug offenses in 2000: 450,000.

Approximate percentage of federal inmates in 2000 who are drug offenders: 60%.

Fraction of these federal drug prisoners who are non-violent, first-time offenders: 1/2.

Amount the U.S. will spend  to keep drug law violators behind bars in the year 2000: $24,000.000.

Change in marijuana use among eighth graders during the height of Clinton’s 1991-1996 anti-marijuana crusade: up 300%.

Number of regular American illegal drug users in 2000: 12,000,000.

Cost of putting a single drug user in prison for five years: $500,000.

Number of drug offenders who could be treated with the money it costs to incarcerate a single non-violent drug offender for five years: more than 100.

Percentage of 12th graders who say it is harder under current drug laws to buy marijuana than to buy beer: 25%.

Number of “drug war orphans”–children with one or both parents serving time for a drug offense–in the year 2000: 1,000,000 plus.

According to FBI figures, number of Americans arrested for marijuana violations alone in 2000: 734,498. 

Likelihood  that “drug war orphans” will themselves end up on prison, as compared to other children: 5 times.

Percentage of the U. S. population that is African American: 12%.

Percentage of total  U. S. drug users who are African American: 13%.

Percentage of total U. S. citizens who are arrested for drug offenses that are African American: 35%.

Percentage of total U. S. citizens that are convicted of drug offenses that are African American: 55%.

Percentage of total U. S. citizens who are incarcerated for drug offenses that are African American: 74%.

Rate at which black men are sent to state prisons for drug offenses as compared with white men: 13 times.

Percentage of Americans who in a 2001 survey said they thought the war on drugs was a failure: 72%.

Average federal sentence for a drug offence in 1997: 78 months.

Average federal sentence for manslaughter in 1997: 30 months.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the number of Americans being drugged as treatment for depression in 1987: 1.7 million.

Number of Americans being drugged for treatment of depression in 1997: 6.2 million.

Of every 100 Americans, the number that are now being treated for clinical depression: 2.3.

Percentage of emergency room visits by older Americans that are caused by adverse reaction to legally prescribed drugs: 11%.

Percentage of Americans 65 and over who according to one study are taking at least one prescription drug: 90%.

Average number of prescription drugs being taken by Americans sixty-five and over: 4.

Number of Americans who die each year from taking legal prescription drugs, not not counting the many thousands who die of medical “accidents” and mistakes: 100,000.

Number who die each day: 270.

Number of Americans who die each day as compared with Americans who die in traffic accidents: Double.

Percentage of Americans who currently take at least one prescription drug: 65%.

Annual expenditure by Americans for prescription drugs: $250 billion.

Amount of “attention deficit drugs” taken by American children as compared with European children: 300%.

Amount spent by the pharmaceutical industry each year to “enlighten” physicians and help with their expenses: $ hundreds of millions.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Paying off the National Debt with Water

By Gene Franks

I read a clip from an engineering magazine about a Canadian inventor named Roy Jomha who has invented a toilet attachment called Econo-Flush. Mr. Jomha says that Econo-Flush can save 68% of the water that is sucked down toilets, and since 43% of the average home’s water goes down the toilet, he calculates that if every U.S. home had an Econo-Flush, the savings could take a big chunk out of the national debt in just a few years. 
This may be a good idea, but I got an even better one from the familiar medical slogan, “If we spend just one dollar on childhood immunization, we save $10 in later medical costs.” This could be the answer to the national debt, sickness care costs, and even world hunger. All we have to do is start spending $1 trillion or so per year on vaccinations, and with the $10 trillion per year we save in medical costs we can soon pay off the national debt and begin feeding the world.

I was pleased to see recently that the Centers for Disease Control, where they have lots of money to study such things, arrived at a similar conclusion about gonorrhea and the price of beer. I’ll let the Alternet  staff writer who calls him- or herself Mad Dog explain:

Somehow the scientists [at CDC] discovered that when alcohol taxes go up, gonorrhea goes down. They explain this by saying that the cheaper beer is, the more of it teenage boys can buy. The more they buy, the more teenage girls drink. And the more teenage girls drink, the more often they go down, which in turn sends the gonorrhea rate up. To put it in Einsteinian terms, beer equals sex and sex equals gonorrhea, therefore beer equals gonorrhea. No one can accuse CDC scientists of being overly complex.

They concluded that we can curb gonorrhea by raising the tax on beer. According to them, adding twenty cents to the price of a six-pack would reduce gonorrhea by about nine percent. This comes to just over two pennies a percent. If that’s the case, why stop there? Why not slap a $2.00 tax on a six-pack and stamp out gonorrhea completely?

Plans like these seem wonderful in the slogan phase,  but when you start applying them to reality you run into problems. Like whose money is being saved? And where does this money go? And doesn’t putting money in Paul’s pocket of necessity entail taking it out of Peter’s?

As a measles “victim” of the 1940s, I can’t remember a lot of expense involved with the illness. I had to miss school a few davs and suffer the inconvenience of having a blotchy face and hiding my comics from my mother. (Reading when you had measles was supposed to be bad for your eyes.) Probably my dad laid out $1.90 or so at the drug store for whatever was the placebo du jour. Apart from the $1.90, which wasn’t really a loss to the national economy since it was a gain for the drug store, and the per diem allowance that the school lost for my non-attendance but the taxpayers saved by not having to pay the school, I’m not aware of any great economic impact that resulted from my measles. Seems like about a break-even transaction to me. Similarly, when I had pertussis, which people called whooping cough in those days, I think not much expense was involved. It happened before I started to school, so there was no lost or saved per diem, and since my mother didn’t work, my illness didn’t slow the wheels of industry by keeping her off the assembly line or anything.

Most of us don’t give much thought to the purpose of measles, mumps, chicken pox and the other childhood diseases we’re always being asked to spend an additional several million a year nationally to “conquer.” Observation has convinced me that the human body, as part of the natural process, operates with an economy that precludes meaningless activities. The “common cold”, despite the lore promoted by doctors and legal drug dealers, isn’t a disease in need of correction, but a highly effective and essential cleaning exercise, initiated and carried out by the body. We owe our well being to orthodox medicine’s repeated failure to “cure” it. Cancer, in one view, is the result of the body’s inability to have a good cold.

When I had pertussis and later asthma, the doctor’s explanation was that pertussis “left me with asthma.” With the advantage of hindsight, my own view is that pertussis, with all the heaving and whooping it involves,  prepared my developing respiratory system to survive the intense asthma attacks that my lifestyle was leading me toward. They should do a study, though they won’t, comparing the life-long respiratory health of pertussis victims with that of children who were “protected” by having pertussis symptoms suppressed by vaccination. I had pertussis and I’ve also had indestructible lungs.

Measles isn’t really something the body “catches” but something the body “does.” No one seems to give much thought to what measles is. What is the body’s purpose for this brief and mildly unpleasant event that, before it was medically upgraded to a life-threatening dilemma, used to visit children once in their life and leave them, but for rare exceptions, all the stronger for the experience?

Dr. Richard Moskowitz, an M.D. and a practicing homeopathic physician, says that “the process of mounting an acute illness like the measles, no less than recovering from it, involves a general mobilization of the entire immune system.” The immune system, contrary to the cartoon version we are usually given, consists of far more than antibody production. Measles exercises the protective tissues at the portal of entry (the respiratory system, in this case), leukocytes and macrophages, the serum complement system, and “a host of other mechanisms, of which the production of circulating antibody is only one, and by no means the most important.” The purpose? Dr. Moskowitz continues:

Such a splendid outpouring leaves little doubt that such illnesses are in fact the decisive experience in the normal physiological maturation of the immune system as a whole in the life of a healthy child. For not only will the child who recovers from measles never again be susceptive to it; such an experience also cannot fail to prepare the individual to respond even more promptly and effectively to any infections he may acquire in the future. The ability to mount a vigorous response to organisms of this type must therefore be reckoned among the fundamental requirements of general well-being.

The practice of immunization, which is essentially an effort to trick the body into producing antibody by introducing a bogus version of the infective agent deep within, not only deprives the immune system of this “decisive experience” in its “normal physiological maturation,” but leaves it burdened for life with foreign contaminants it has no way of expelling.Gazette columnist Tiger Tom has said that vaccination is an initiation rite to lifelong servitude to the great modern Church of Medicine.

Beware of politicians who come to us, paying their debts to the Church of Medicine, with outstretched palms and tearful pleas for a wonderful vaccination revival that will enrich the poor and alleviate their suffering. Their crusade is really against that most feared heretic, the unvaccinated child. The “healthcare is warfare” dogma that drives the Church of Medicine supports itself on faith in the sacrament of vaccination. What the Church can least afford is a large control group of happy, healthy, unvaccinated children.

 

Should You Be Worried About Arsenic in Your Water?

by Gene Franks

Humans have always had to deal with contradiction. What’s good today is bad tomorrow.  Science stakes out a rigid position and in most cases eventually decides that the opposite is true. The American Medical Association would like you to forget that it endorsed smoking and told mothers that breast milk was nutritionally inadequate just a few short decades ago.  Chlorine, coffee, fluoride, knee surgery, sugar, estrogen therapy, therapeutic bleeding–you could name dozens–have had their ups and downs.

We’re so used to contradictory information that people didn’t  get too excited when the EPA announced that the allowable safe level for arsenic in water really isn’t 50 parts per billion (ppb), as “the experts” have been telling us for years, but it is really only 10 ppb.

How did the government’s mandated “safe” level of arsenic in drinking water shrink overnight from 50 to 10 parts per billion? Does this mean that arsenic suddenly has become more lethal? Should we take the 10 ppb limit seriously, or is it just another Swine Flu-style fundraiser?

The new arsenic limit should definitely be taken seriously.  Arsenic poisoning is terrible. And lowering the level took some real political courage.  Water utilities that were overnight out of compliance were faced with very expensive treatment requirements, and they screamed loudly.

The big drop in arsenic allowable actually makes sense. The  initial  limit for arsenic was set at 50 ppb simply because test labs before 1975 weren’t able to detect arsenic at levels below 50 ppb.  As tests got better, it became obvious that 50 ppb was too high.

After much deliberation, the EPA, with intense political pressure from both sides of the issue,  proposed reducing the allowable to 5 ppb in 2000, although the final rule did not take effect until 2006.  The number by that time had been negotiated up to the current 10 ppb.  (Two states, North Carolina and New Jersey, have independently set the arsenic allowable at 5 ppb.)

Arsenic Poisoning

Arsenic poisoning is implicated in cancers of the bladder, lungs, skin, liver, prostate and kidneys as well as non-carcinogenic endocrine, pulmonary, cardiovascular, and neurological damage. At around 60 parts per million in food or water it is an immediate threat to life and can result in sudden death.  (Note that that’s 60 parts per million, which is 60,000 parts per billion–or 6,000 times the current EPA allowable.)

The truth is that we get arsenic from lots of sources, including food. Rice, for instance, is often a source of unwanted arsenic. We get plenty of arsenic from our environment and certainly don’t need more in our water.  The only truly safe level of arsenic in water is zero.

From a water treatment standpoint,  arsenic reduction can be very easy or very complicated. Although plain carbon filtration can usually make a moderate reduction, the most commonly used strategies are reverse osmosis, anion exchange, distillation, and filtration with iron-based media. The complicated part is that arsenic exists mainly in two forms–As(III) and As(V).  Since As(III) is hard to remove and As(V) is relatively easy, the usual strategy is to convert As(III) to As(V) by oxidation to facilitate removal.  Here’s more detailed information.

How many Indians and Bangladeshis are exposed to a high level of arsenic in their drinking water? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, estimates vary from a low of 28 to 35 million to a high of 77 million—more than half the population of Bangladesh, one of the most crowded nations. It is estimated that over a million Indians are also drinking arsenic-laced water. Newer cases of arsenic poisoning in the Ganges Basin suggest that many of the region’s 449 million residents could be at risk.

Dipankar Chakraborti, a researcher at the Jadavpur University in Kolkatta, India believes that more than 50 million people are exposed and thousands are already showing symptoms of poisoning.

Bangladeshis are being poisoned—usually without knowing it—by drinking water drawn from wells. Three decades ago health and development experts, and small local contractors, dug millions of deep tube wells throughout Bangladesh. The expertsencouraged the whole nation to drink well water because it was deemed to be safe, free of the bacteria that causes water-borne diseases such as diarrhea and other intestinal maladies that have long plagued the tropical country.

But in switching from rivers and other surface sources of water, the people of Bangladesh may have exchanged water-borne diseases for slow poisoning by arsenic. In the 1970’s public health specialists and government policy-makers were unaware of the problem. It was only in 1993 that “clean” well water was discovered to contain dangerous quantities of the poison.

“It is a terrible public catastrophe,” said Allan H. Smith, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a WHO consultant who has investigated the problem in Bangladesh on several trips.

The number of people affected by the arsenic disaster ranks with those being threatened by the biggest killer diseases. “By virtue of its sheer size it is pushing the limits of our knowledge and capacity to respond to it,” said Hans van Ginkel, rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo.

In a new effort to alleviate the crisis, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is undertaking a project in which integrated geologic, hydrologic, and geochemical approaches will be used to develop criteria that will identify and map sources of safe or low-arsenic ground water. This involves the digging of new deep bore wells which might help determine arsenic levels in boththe Meghna and Ganges river basins.

Local people are being used to manually dig to the sort of depths that in the western world are normally accessible only with the assistance of sophisticated drilling rigs. David W. Clark, a specialist with USGS who is currently working in Bangladesh, says, “I have been amazed that the local folks are drilling wells up to 1,200 feet (366 meters) deep using no machinery of any kind. It is a lot of hard work and the drillers are very skilled and do an excellent job.”

But what really intrigues Clark is watching the drillers remove the 1,200 feet (36 meters) of drill stem from the well. “The entire crew of 25 to 30 laborers would climb the derrick singing a local Bangla folk song in response to the leader…at a given point they would all jump off hanging onto a rope to try to extract the pipe…this would move the pipe a few feet,” he said. “The entire process takes many hours, but it gets done.”

According to the USGS the purpose of drilling these deep wells is to get a better definition of the deep aquifer system and to see if—at least in some areas—it may provide a viable source of potable water, free of arsenic.

WHO’s most recent guideline for the maximum amount of arsenic in drinking water recommends 10 parts per billion (ppb). That was in 1993 when it was lowered to that level from 50 ppb. But most water consumed in arsenic-affected areas in Bangladesh has substantially higher levels, frequently far above 50 ppb.

Arsenic-contaminated water is not restricted to developing countries. In the western states of the United States of America about 13 million people drink arsenic-tainted water, albeit less contaminated than the well water in Bangladesh. Australia, too, has arsenic-contaminated water. So do Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Mexico, Taiwan (Province of China), Thailand, Vietnam, and the eastern areas of India in Bengal.

Arsenic poisoning is recognizable from skin color changes, blotches all over the face and body, hyper pigmentation on the chest and upper arms, hard patches on palms and soles of the feet, inability to walk, debilitating pain, and watery eyes.

In the developed world, sophisticated methods of arsenic treatment exist. US well owners avail themselves of reverse osmosis, specialized filtration and ion exchange technologies to remove arsenic from water that tests a few parts per billion over the 10 ppb MCL. These technologies are not available in Bangladesh and other poor regions. A variety of simple filters have been devised to address arsenic poisoning in these regions with varying degrees of success.

For more information about arsenic and treatment of arsenic, please go to the Pure Water Occasional’s  Water Treatment Issues section.