Drinking Water Contamination Pretty Common, Says Study

A recent report from a non-profit environmental group confirms what I’ve said for years: we’ve got a serious drinking water contamination problem.  Specifically, this report mentions chromium-6, a carcinogen that entered into popular awareness from the movie “Erin Brocovich”.

You know, every six or eight months, some yahoo at some newspaper or other media outlet decides to re-visit the same old nonsense story about how drinking tap water is fantastic, delicious, and cures all ills, while bottled water is a big fat sham and anybody that buys bottled water is a giant stupidhead (their words, folks, not mine.  Okay, maybe I embellished SLIGHTLY).  In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

I learned that typical municipal water supplies are a delightful mix of deadly poisons years ago while getting my doctorate.  While taking a public health class, the professor mentioned that they had tested the water fountains with a pool testing kit and found the chlorine levels UNSAFE TO SWIM IN, let alone DRINK.

And yet, every year, some politician will start up a propaganda campaign on how safe and fantastic their water supply is, and how bottled water is just some guy in a stained T-shirt filling old plastic jugs with a garden hose out in his back yard, cackling evilly the entire time.  It’s infuriating.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are some bottled water brands that are indeed worthless.  But there’s other brands that are highly, highly filtered.  Yes, it’s true, they may get their feed water from a municipal water supply, and THEN they send it through a bazillion filters that take out 99% or more of the pollutants.  So a good quality brand of filtered, bottled water is definitely better than sucking down the toxic crap that normally comes out of the tap.

I’m getting slightly off topic.  I do that sometimes.  We were discussing a recent study on contaminated water.

The Study On Drinking Water Contamination

The testing was conducted by a non-profit group called The Environmental Working Group.  They had volunteers  around the country collect local water supplies and then tested those samples for hexavalent chromium (chromium-6), and were shocked to find a heck of lot more of this stuff than they thought they would.

Twenty-five out of thirty-five major cities tested over California’s state limits. TWENTY-FIVE out of thirty-five!  That’s… *pulls out calculator, punches buttons furiously* …71.4% of cities tested!  Thirty-one out of thirty-five (89%) had measurable levels of the stuff .

California is the only state to regulate chromium-6 levels, and they say don’t go over 0.06 ppb (parts per billion).  The big winner in this study, Normon, Oklahoma, has levels TWO HUNDRED times that.

Here’s how the cities stacked up:

Norman, Okla. – 12.9 ppb
Honolulu, Hi. – 2.00 ppb
Riverside, Calif. – 1.69 ppb
Madison, Wis. – 1.58 ppb
San Jose, Calif. – 1.34 ppb
Tallahassee, Fla. – 1.25 ppb
Omaha, Neb. – 1.07 ppb
Albuquerque, N.M. – 1.04 ppb
Pittsburgh, Pa. – 0.88 ppb
Bend, Ore. – 0.78 ppb
Salt Lake City, Utah – 0.30 ppb
Ann Arbor, Mich. – 0.21 ppb
Atlanta, Ga. – 0.20 ppb
Los Angeles, Calif. – 0.20 ppb
Bethesda, Md. – 0.19 ppb
Phoenix, Ariz. – 0.19 ppb
Washington, D.C – 0.19 ppb
Chicago, Ill. – 0.18 ppb
Milwaukee, Wis. – 0.18 ppb
Villanova, Pa. – 0.18 ppb
Sacramento, Calif. – 0.16 ppb
Louisville, Ky. – 0.14 ppb
Syracuse, N.Y. – 0.12 ppb
New Haven, Conn. – 0.08 ppb
Buffalo, N.Y. – 0.07 ppb
Las Vegas, Nev. – 0.06 ppb
New York, N.Y. – 0.06 ppb
Scottsdale, Ariz. – 0.05 ppb
Miami, Fla. – 0.04 ppb
Boston, Mass. – 0.03 ppb
Cincinnati, Ohio – 0.03 ppb

Go Philly!  We’re only three times higher than safe levels!  Hurray!  (Villanova is suburb of Philly, for those of you who aren’t from around here).

By the way, if you live in Reno, Nevada, you’re cool.  No chromium-6 there.

Dangers of Chromium-6

Okay, so big whoop.  There’s something called chromium-6 or whatever in our water.  So what?

So cancer, that’s what, Tough Guy.  In particular, this chemical seems to be really, really good at causing stomach cancer.  Animal studies suggest it also causes damage to the liver and lymph nodes (not surprising, as those are filtration systems for the body).

Certain populations are more susceptible to damage.  Children and infants are at more risk from exposure to carcinogens in general, and people with low-acid stomachs are more likely to have problems as well (it’s harder for them to convert chromium-6 to the useful form).  Who has a low acid stomach?  Well, people taking antacids or proton pump inhibitors for indigestion, for starters.

Where’s This Stuff Coming From And Why Are We Drinking it?

Chromium-6 can erode from the soil, but normally it comes from steel and pulp mills, or metal plating or leather tanning industries.  The standards on this chemical are strangely lax; even though the EPA finally got around to labelling it likely to cause cancer, there’s still no nationwide standard on it.  Instead, federal guidelines measure “total chromium”, which includes the vital mineral form trivalent chromium (chromium is important in glucose metabolism) as well as the carcinogenic chromium-6.

Even then, they’re only regulating it to a level so that it won’t irritate the skin.  Do you think maybe a chemical gets potentially more dangerous in lower doses if you bypass the skin by, say, DRINKING it?  I think so.  I think that’s why we don’t drink chlorinated pool water.

So the bottom line is, there’s no real protection going on here.  There’s tons of this carcinogenic compound in a large percentage of our tap water, and nobody’s bothering to do anything about it.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  Don’t wait for the goverment to fix things for you.  You’re in for a long wait.

Plus, I want you to think about this.  Chromium-6 is ONE chemical pollutant that we know about in tap water. THAT WE KNOW ABOUT.  If there’s one, there’s probably more.  So I’m worried about the water contamination that we DON’T know is there, even more so than what we DO know is in there. As ridiculous as these chromium-6 levels are, they’re also indicative of a much greater problem.

My advice is to stick to filtered water.  I flat out refuse to drink tap water. Ideally, you would filter both drinking and bathing water, but definitely don’t drink that toxic crap coming out of your tap.  I’ll be following up soon with another article on the specifics of filtered water, how to choose a filter (or brand), etc.,  but until then, get yourself a few jugs of distilled water and stick to that.

Check that list of cities… how does YOURS stack up for drinking water contamination?

Stay healthy!

Source article: http://static.ewg.org/reports/2010/chrome6/html/home.html