Water pollution
cmonforton | October 20, 2017The headlines are grabbing people's attention:
CBC News: "Pollution causing more deaths worldwide than war or smoking"; CNN: "Pollution linked to 9 million deaths worldwide in 2015, study says"; BBC: "Pollution linked to one in six deaths"; Associated Press: "Pollution killing more people every year than wars, disaster and hunger, study says"; The Independent: "Pollution is killing millions of people a year and the world is reaching 'crisis point', experts warn."
News outlets are referring to a report released yesterday by The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. The report’s authors…
revere | May 2, 2010Everyone has heard by now that there is a catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not an oil expert, so I won't discuss this much here. There is a lot of information already in the media. I am quite familiar with drinking water issues, however, and over the weekend we received news of another catastrophic leak, this one affecting the Boston Metropolitan area. Several million people there are now under a "boil water" order because a section of steel pipe bringing water from its main surface supplies tens of miles to the west of Boston and surrounding communities blew out and the main…
revere | April 8, 2010Yesterday I gave a nod to an important epidemiologist, the late Alice Stewart. I'm old enough to have known her, but not old enough to know the most famous epidemiologist of all -- indeed sometimes called the "Father of Epidemiology" -- Dr. John Snow. Snow is also claimed as the "Father of Anesthesiology" because he administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the births of her second and third children, thus popularizing the practice in the mid 19th century. Neither epidemiologists nor anesthesiologists seem to be aware that their dad had two families, but that's another issue. The…
revere | February 23, 2010Still working on the grant and today was our Mock Study Section. It was an experiment that in the view of all participants (there were about 35 reviewers in the room) was a highly successful one. But after hearing the litany of strengths and weaknesses I'm worn out. I naturally focussed on the weaknesses. We have over a month to fix things but the image of the ship going down swam before my eyes, even when surfing for blog fodder:
In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania, a passenger vessel sunk during…
revere | October 14, 2009I don't fly as much as I used to but I still fly too often for my likes and when the cart comes around for the free beverages it's either orange juice "with no ice" or a bloody mary mix "with no ice." I rarely drink water, but if I did, I would never drink the water out of a pitcher, as offered to me a couple of weeks ago on Air Canada. From a bottle, maybe, but since bottled water isn't as well regulated as tap water, I usually don't partake. I know a fair amount about public drinking water, but one day I was seated on a plane next to somebody who knew a lot about airplanes and he said he'd…
revere | July 11, 2009It's Saturday and it's summertime and Mrs. R. and I are still in the city. OK with me. I'm a city boy and find it easiest to maintain upright posture on asphalt, but my bride of 37 years likes the beach, so most summers we go off for a few weeks to the seashore (speaking littorally). It's down south where the water is warm but I still spend a lot of time inside in air conditioned splendor, listening to music and reading. Mrs. R. props herself up at the earth - water interface with her own pile of books, far from other people and the hazards of pathogenic viruses. It turns out, not really.…
revere | April 20, 2009When a small body of water, say a slow flowing creek or water in a drainage ditch, "goes septic" it starts to stink, often giving off a rotten egg odor (hydrogen sulfide, H2S). This isn't a sign that the water is polluted in the chemical sense of toxic materials. It means that so much organic matter has entered the water that the bacteria there have gone on a food orgy. The initial gluttons are aerobic bugs that need oxygen as a final electron acceptor to generate energy for their needs. When the feasting aerobes use up all the oxygen they die and are replaced by a new set of diners, the…
revere | April 2, 2009There has been more talk recently that our wastewater are loaded with pharmaceuticals. No surprise. People often dump out of date pills down the toilet, but much more important, they send them flushing in by excreting them. That's wastewater, though, not drinking water. They do get into drinking water, too, but at much lower levels. Now the EPA and collaborators at Baylor University have found another pathway to humans. Fish:
Fish from 5 U.S. rivers were found to be tainted with traces of medications and common chemicals, according to a new study from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…
revere | March 10, 2009Way back on New Year's Eve of 2005, when we were still hosted over at Blogger, I did one of my more popular posts about how a toilet works. Most people don't know. I'm guessing they have some kind of vague mental image that when you push the toilet handle a trapdoor opens up somewhere and the contents of the toilet bowl fall through to the abyss. But that's not what happens and I felt compelled to explain it. The pretext was a long article from the Wall Street Journal about how toilets are tested. The official testing material is . . . miso (a Japanese fermented soybean paste). I thought of…
revere | January 14, 2009One of the triumphs of 19th and 20th century public health was the provision of piped water into cities and towns. With the use of modern methods of disinfection (primarily chlorination) water as a source of mass distributed poisons rapidly receded, and with it the preponderance of infectious diseases that were the scourge of urban life. Urban water supplied were an efficient means to provide a healthy required substance, water, to the whole population and once. But of course it is also an efficient means to distribute unhealthy stuff -- not just microbes but chemicals. I've worked on the…
revere | December 13, 2008Whether they are called the White House Press Secretary or the regime's Information Minister, they seem to have in common one characteristic: they are professional liars. It goes without saying that all of Bush's press secretaries have been blatant liars, but it's also true of Clinton's and virtually very one of their predecessors. Some of them have been much more likable than others and when they lied made my hackles rise less, but they were still professional liars and why anyone believes what they say is one of the big mysteries. I have to keep reminding myself that our "Information…
revere | December 2, 2008Cholera is a vicious disease. It can take a healthy person and kill him or her in a day by rapidly dehydrating them from a massive, watery diarrhea. The resulting electrolyte imbalance can lead to vascular collapse or cardiac arrest. Cholera is usually spread by fecally contaminated drinking water, and hence is completely preventable. It is also easily treatable by keeping the patient hydrated with the oral rehydration therapy, basically minimally fortified water. Yet this preventable and treatable disease is now epidemic in the country of Zimbabwe. Government sources admit to over 400 deaths…
revere | October 28, 2008Most people know that a good place to pick up an antibiotic resistant infection is in a hospital. Lots of pathogenic bugs there living (often) happily in a sea of antimicrobial agents. Better to stay away from hospitals, somewhere nice. But apparently, not at the beach:
A drug-resistant germ linked to surgical wound and urinary tract infections was found on five U.S. West Coast beaches, according to scientists who said the bacteria isn't usually seen outside of hospitals.
Samples of sand and water were taken from seven public beaches and a fishing pier in the state of Washington and southern…
revere | May 17, 2008It contaminates the water supplies of about 11 million people in 35 states. It is suspected of interfering with iodide cycling in a way that could suppress thyroid hormone, a hormone necessary for the proper development of the fetus. Its source is military bases and aerospace companies. The health and environmental agencies of affected states have been waiting years for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate it. A decision may come "before the end of the year" (just after the election):
Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water, said the EPA will decide…
revere | April 30, 2008Every day seems to bring a new story about the crap we are leaving strewn around our environment. Not just trash but chemical trash, the kind of stuff we eat, pop as pills or dispose of and which winds up as molecules in our air, water and food. You may think you know more than you want to about this but in fact you know very little about it because no one knows much about it. For example, there are no systematic measurements of the stuff in the raw water that goes into our water treatment plants, facilities designed to handle micro-organisms and not chemicals. The EPA has a program called…
revere | April 21, 2008"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive pollute." I know it doesn't rhyme. But the tangled web is real:
Songbirds feeding near the contaminated South River are showing high levels of mercury, even though they aren't eating food from the river itself, according to a paper published by William and Mary researchers in the journal Science.
Lead author Dan Cristol said his paper has wide-ranging international environmental implications. Mercury is one of the world's most troublesome pollutants, especially in water. The South River, a major tributary of Virginia's…
revere | March 24, 2008If you want to know what advances in public health and medicine in the last 150 years have done the most for the overall health of the community a major contender for the top spot would have to be the provision of safe and abundant drinking water. The first piped water supplies for major American cities date to shortly before the Civil War (mid nineteenth century) and disinfection with chlorine didn't start until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. The results for major waterborne infectious diseases like typhoid fever and various maladies just categorized as diarrhea and…
revere | March 10, 2008I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to say, too, something that underscores my point in triplicate.
But first the main point:.
It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two Northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in…
revere | March 6, 2008We don't especially like being anonymous on this blog but we feel it is prudent given the retributive nature of this administration. We don't care that much ourselves as we are pretty well established. But we worry that our students, our colleagues and our institution will become collateral damage in retribution for things we say here. It's not just that we read about this stuff in the news. We know the people involved personally. Last week we posted about Deb Rice, a scientist in the State of Maine health department who is also one of the world authorities on the health effects of the…
revere | February 26, 2008As I write this I am at 30,000 feet winging my way to Montreal, Canada, where the temperature is below freezing. So what more appropriate topic than microbial hazards of bathing beaches? Maybe it was my foray into the wonderful world of fecal accidents that prompted me to look further into the subject but I found a couple of papers from last year by a groups at Johns Hopkins about the effect of bather density on levels of parasites pathogenic for humans at one particular beach in Maryland, the Hammerman area of Gunpowder Falls State Park in Chase, Maryland in mid to late summer of 2006 (here…