Rainwater everywhere on the planet is unsafe to drink due to chemicals (2022)
phys.org
phys.org
> "What's changed is the guidelines. They've gone down millions of times since the early 2000s, because we've learned more about the toxicity of these substances."
I think what's changed most is our standards. Used to be if you survived to reproduce, you were doing pretty good. Extra points if you got to watch your kids grow up. Now the standard is basically "Every substance that can be demonstrated to have worse health outcomes than its absence is toxic" - which on a technical level is true, and might even be what you care about, but you also need take a bigger-picture perspective and weigh it against all the other risks of ordinary living you face.
PFAS didn't exist 75 years ago. Now we've almost permanently contaminated our environment and atmosphere with it, that's quite a big change.
To emphasize, I think that point is very debatable, but I don't know enough about the real harms of PFAS to comment. But I do think it's valid to have a substantive debate on the true harms of PFAS, even if the other side of that debate is that comparing ourselves now to a time when the majority of kids died is the wrong yardstick.
However, statistically the things that are most likely to prevent you from passing on your genes are:
1. Not making enough money.
2. Anxiety/depression
3. Drug overdoses
4. Car accidents
5. An unhappy family life
6. Swimming pools
Everything on your statistical list looks right, and can probably be proven by a stack of peer-reviewed scientific studies from medicine, sociology, psychology...
And yet as an argument, it's worthless. Worse... it's dangerous.
Because in your schema, the impact of climate change, pollution and other threats that will end this species each rank as zero! You get to "pass on your genes" merely to consign a few hundred of your descendents to a miserable death.
This is the tyranny of instrumental reason that you so cleverly use against the goal (reproduction of genes) that you purport to champion.
I think the point is 100-300 years (maybe longer?) from now things might reach a tipping point.
That's kinda my complaint here. Imagination is more important than knowledge. If we started much earlier in education explaining to kids how remarkable and fragile our existence is, how intricately interconnected we are with nature, birds, bees, mushrooms and microbes, then maybe Hollywood disaster movie plots wouldn't seem like the only route to the end of humanity.
Not saying this will be a pleasant experience. Billions may starve. But that still leaves billions, and the purely mercenary reality is that money is what puts you on one side of that dividing line or the other.
In a "purely mercenary reality", what you need to survive is not wealth, but peace, and that is something you cannot buy with many of the futures we're now looking at.
In a funny way, PFAS is a great metaphor. Forever chemicals have now been found in places nobody would ever have predicted. Bad things have a way of spreading in ways you won't see until they're at the gate. It might not be a good idea to bet the farm on isolationism and exceptionalism.
That helps, but there are more participants in traffic than just you.
From Wikipedia:
> Chlormequat has not previously been registered for use on food crops in the United States. In April 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed allowing the use of the chemical on food crops such as barley, oat, triticale, and wheat. The EPA’s human health risk assessment indicated "no dietary, residential, or aggregate (i.e., combined dietary and residential exposures) risks of concern." No risks were identified by EPA to aquatic species of invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants in addition to terrestrial plants.
So probably not coated in it.
... unless you regularly eat more than 85,000 tons of oats.
Between muesli in the summer and oatmeal in the winter I'm averaging close to that, but I exercise a lot so I got that going for me.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00643-4
"Chlormequat was detected at low concentrations in samples from 2017 through 2022, with a significant increase in concentrations for samples from 2023. We also observed high detection frequencies of chlormequat in oat-based foods. These findings and chlormequat toxicity data raise concerns about current exposure levels, and warrant more expansive toxicity testing, food monitoring, and epidemiological studies to assess health effects of chlormequat exposures in humans."
...
"Despite being approved for use on crops in Europe and parts of North America, chlormequat exhibits concerning toxicological properties, as documented in historical as well as more recently published laboratory animal studies. In the early 1980s, the impacts of chlormequat exposure on reproductive toxicity and fertility were first described by Danish pig farmers who observed reproductive declines in pigs raised on chlormequat treated grains [4]. These observations were later investigated in controlled laboratory experiments on pigs and mice, whereby female pigs fed chlormequat treated grain exhibited disrupted oestrus cycling and difficulty mating compared to animals on a control chlormequat-free diet [4]. Additionally, male mice exposed to chlormequat via diet or drinking water during development exhibited decreased fertilization capacity of sperm in vitro [5]. More recent reproductive toxicity studies on chlormequat show delayed onset of puberty, reduced sperm motility, decreased weights of male reproductive organs, and decreased testosterone levels in rats exposed during sensitive windows of development, including during pregnancy and early life [6,7,8]. Developmental toxicity studies also suggest that chlormequat exposure during pregnancy can dysregulate fetal growth and metabolism [9]. Other investigations did not find impacts of chlormequat on reproduction in female mice, male pigs, or a subsequent investigation of fertilization capacity in male mice developmentally and postnatally exposed to chlormequat [4, 10, 11]. Equivocal evidence in the toxicological literature on chlormequat may be due to differences in doses tested and outcomes measured as well as selection of model organism and the sex of laboratory animals. Consequently, further investigation is warranted."
Thanks for making me aware of this. I've been trying to make a point of avoiding PFAS, but it seems to be everywhere.
> The study found that women who flossed with Oral-B Glide floss had higher levels of a chemical called perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS) in their blood than women who didn’t use that type of floss.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...
Another one is nitrites in processed meat. All the fancy "health conscious" brands proudly state "NO NITRITES!", but then those ass hats put in a bunch of celery salt...which is just nitrites with a different name.
Note: For anyone curious, trader joes actually does sell a bacon with no nitrites of any form. First and only time I have seen it.
Marketing that takes into accounts biases of particular target group. That particular case is, I think, becoming common: since large fraction of the population is irrationally afraid of anything that has numbers in its name, whether as digits or words in any language, the companies look for whatever plant they can pull that specific substance from, and use that in production process - possibly compromising quality and efficiency, but allowing them to write ${good natural plant} in the ingredient list instead of evil E-number or satanic 6-6-hexa-whatever.
I'm conflicted about this practice. On the one hand, I hate pulling wool over other people's eyes; on the other hand, I also hate reflexive fear and anti-intellectualism of our society.
To wit:
People used to do all sorts of self-harming things not knowing any better and now we do fewer of them.
The Romans used to sweeten their wines with powdered lead. The ancient Chinese alchemists used to make elixirs of immortality out of mercury compounds and feed them to their wealthy.
I'm not saying things are good now and that we shouldn't push for them to be better, not by any means.
Rather I am saying that as we take further steps towards optimal human health, aligning our common environmental encounters with our biology, we should remember that the effort people have put in to get us this far is only going to take us half as far the next time, and half again the time after.
And that is all well and good, progress is progress, right?
However, does it not seem like the smaller the flaw we find the more we get upset about it?
I believe this phenomenon is caused by a continuing delusion that we were once ever perfect, that we ever lived in harmony with nature, that there is some paradisian SI Garden of Eden unit we can measure our present environment against, and that the current state of events is the face of our fall from grace and must be destroyed like the monster it is.
I believe the truth is things have never been better in hundreds of ways, and they're going to keep getting better as we repent of our past mistakes and learn more about what mistakes we are still currently making, and that the world 25 years from now will be as different a world as the world of today is to the world of 1999.
That collective handwringing (set in eternal struggle as it is with financial greed) is what got us here, and it's what will get us the next 50% and the 50% after that. Wink and enjoy the ride.
My personal ability to influence these things is so small compared to the vast swathes of the ignorant who just go with the flow of the mainstream.
Any energy I spend trying to influence things outside of my control is wasted.
Therefore, I will only endeavor to control that which I have the ability to control.
"God grant me the serenity", if you will.
/s
Non-reactive also means doesn’t interact chemically with other chemicals, which is a desirable thing in a plastic that might be ingested. While maybe not awesome that it sits in silt not reacting to the end of time, if it also doesn’t react with anything in your body, it’s safe to take into your body, no?
The problem with some PFAS is they don’t readily degrade but they’re biologically reactive and interact with the bodies chemistry. That’s not a great feature. But it’s a huge class of chemicals, all of which are chemicals stable due to their carbon fluorine bonds - one of the most stable bonds in nature. But that doesn’t mean they can’t react in ways that don’t break the molecule apart, or form other chemicals that maintain the integrity of the C-F bond.
But it also doesn’t mean that they DO react.
Life isn’t so simple it can be reduced to a mantra like “plastic bad” or whatever. PTFE has a lot of very useful characteristics, and its lack of reactivity in the body isn’t the least of them.
Whenever this topic of Glide being toxic comes up they cite this article :
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...
Which is written based off this study:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0109-y
Which is based off blood samples drawn in 2010-2013, which is at the time PFOA was being phased out of the PTFE production process due to lawsuits around the PFOA toxicity, which DuPont was aware of. The new process using GenX (seriously), which is known to cause problems too but at a lesser extreme than PFOA. However the issue with PTFE was with the residuals of PFOA which you don’t find in commercial PTFE for GenX.
And yes, PTFE is widely used in medical implants and devices.
" I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an
hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work
twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission
to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and
dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah." [0]
unless you're actually arguing for toxic chemicals in the water that didn't exist more than 60 years ago
All of those commenters deconstructing my clumsy use of "Noble Savage" (I admit it's not quite the right thing) - are indeed (maybe wilfully) missing the point.
A better expression might be the "Parochialism of the present". But that doesn't quite get to it. Nor even Thomas Hobbes' flowery and overblown conceit of past life as "Nasty, brutish and short".
It's about a phenomenon of lionising a one dimensional idea of "progress" in a patently self-deceiving way.
Noble savage = humans fundamentally corrupted by civilisational progress
Or what other name might we give to this phenomenon of dismissing extinction level mistakes with the appeal to the idea that "hey, it's progress"?
If you don't acknowledge any of the tradeoffs involved in pollution and instead just make a point about harm in a vacuum, it's hard to know how to consider it.
Like the overwhelming exceptionalism of how we all care about the environment and the future health of our children... just don't take our gas-guzzling cars and non-stick pans way!
We are not rational beings, but we so deeply believe we are.
If the cybertruck was out a year earlier, I suspect I know a few people driving "gas guzzling" trucks that would have bought that instead, because it would have been cheaper, faster, and in almost every measurable and unmeasurable quality, better.
Why do you think people will forever hold on to ICE? It strikes me that electric cars are a step change in almost every way, maybe the reason people still have ICE is they didnt have a compatible electric alternative at the time.
Also, as you say, it's an easy way to explain away our problems, to say that people in the past were better and if they were here today then they wouldn't be complaining like we are.
Now, to your contention that "we've screwed up as a civilisation". What do you mean exactly? What civilization and when did the screwing up start?
As I have pointed out in other remarks here today, calmness reasonableness do not make a bad position good. If anything they add a palatable veneer to the harm.
> It in no way overplayed the misery of the past
I completely disagree. The idea that in the past people were "lucky to see their children grow up" is dramatic, and a tautology anyway since we are all "lucky" to see our children grow up in any epoch. It paints a needlessly bleak picture of some awful past that technological progress is implied to have eliminated with justifiable costs.
> What do you mean exactly? What civilization?
Actually, you know what. You're right [0].
"What do I think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea."
You got me there, I do think the costs for (almost) eliminating famine and diseases with double-digit mortality rates are justifiable. That said you didn't really answer my question, but I'll roll with it.
Consider the extinction of megafauna [0], the deforestation of China [1] or Mesopotamian farming practices [2]. It would be hard to blame these on Western civilization (real or imagined). I'd say we have been operating in the same unsustainable way for a long time. I wish it were otherwise because it would make everything easier.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.325... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003101822... [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.128.3334.1251
Fair remark, I brushed it off.
> when did this start?
It started when science and technology changed from something we do, into something we believe in.
I don't think that actually happened any time around the Enlightenment of even the Industrial Revolution, but we're definitely deep in it now. I'll leave you to put the pin in the map.
Also, the cause and effect are not so simple. It's not as if we changed our culture and beliefs, and then embarked on a century of planet-destroying madness. Rather, like the sunk-cost bias of an addict, we realised we are on a bad road, labelled that as "inevitable", surrendered before the forces of "technological determinism" and found we had no choice but to believe.
But that was a false choice.
Homo plasticus has polluted the atmosphere and oceans, exploited topsoil and groundwater to the point of long-term destruction, and made polymers part of the global food supply. [1,2,4]
> Used to be if you survived to reproduce, you were doing pretty good.
Used to be.
And if you were lucky, you lived in a stable democracy instead of any one of the variants of violent dictatorship.
Fertility levels are in steep decline. Today's children will grow to adulthood in a world abused to the point of global disaster. [3]
Things have changed for the worse in ways that our species has never before faced.
= = =
[1]_ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-a-first-micropl... , https://www.theseacleaners.org/news/microplastics-in-human-b...
[2]_ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/06/16/humans-...
[3]_ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is...
This question of "facing things" is what bothers me. Sure, science and technology is difficult and has awful side effects. Progress is a complex vector, and it isn't easy to have 'purpose' (telos) see where we should be going.
But what I see here every day is very intelligent, witty, well read people ... using their intelligence against themselves. The extraordinary intellectual acrobatics of denial and apologetics just makes me weep. And so many who just down-vote challenging questions but lack the patience and courage to form an argument.
Fear of the unknown is an impetus for herd mentality.
Hopefully your comment ceases to be gray…
How about adding random characters and line noise to unpopular comments, or replacing odd words to make them seem more deranged and subtract credibility? That wo ld g1ve the "hacker-like" #eel 00f marg1nal comments ^e$inG aT th33 3nd of s0me %$(k3d Up dd^H^H^Hddddistant dddddial-up modem w$)th iiiine noize insert hippopotamus hatstands sleep furiously
Can you hear me?
this is a lame attempt to flatter our intelligence but then criticize for not engaging on what are essentially marketing platforms where the stakes are usually zero, and there is no way to demonstrably prove that we're not shills, morons, or GPT bots.
and IVF works. (yes, it's a bit more risky than the Nike method - just do it, yes, it's expensive, but having kids is a lot more expensive usually.)
the linked BBC article seems to contradict its title ("For the majority of men with fertility problems, the cause remains unexplained")
also, mixing up ability and willingness to have kids is just fucking revolting. of course a lot of people are don't have kids, because bad journalism takes away people's joy. well, also this little thing called ladder pulling, and the usual coordination problems (NIMBYs, etc)
The risk calculation feels different in those cases.
But I agree we live with so many other risks, there may conceivably be better windmills to tilt.
Heart disease dominates the US health problems. Maybe we could do something about food in America. Something we can actually do something about, with a measurable improvement in living.
And so on.
“Sorry kid, but at least your dad got to see you ride your first bike, chalk that up to win, used to be much worse! You know, DuPont and 3M can’t give ground all the time.”
It is very hard to read about the cancer clusters in WV/OH around the heavy PFAS sites and not feel some extreme disgust at how bad it got and feel thankful that this is getting significant attention.
With so many people deciding to go childless i am not so sure.
How does it get into the chickens? No one knows atm. The rain? The food? It seems like the stuff is just everywhere indeed. We also stopped eating our eggs, looking for a testing service.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dutch-court-rule...
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/dutch-governmen...
Airports are notorious sources, PFA's were used in fire fighting foams for a decade or more (depending on global location).
If we just want the first step before treatment plants, it depend on location. Generally it is what ever water that is cleanest and cheapest, usually lakes and rivers with the best connection and high flow of ground water. Ground water tend to be highly filtered which lowers the amount of treatment that treatment plants has to do.
Rainwater collection is usually not used for drinking water given the high amount of pollution. It can be used in industry/agriculture, or as backup for areas where the ground water is severely limited.
> PFAS compounds, used since the 1940s for many purposes, from stain and waterproofing to firefighting, continue to be a concern. Tests of MWRA water show only trace amounts of these compounds, too small to be quantified, and well below the state standard of 20 parts per trillion. MWRA results are also well below recently proposed EPA standards.
[0] https://www.mwra.com/annual/waterreport/2022results/PDFS/Bos...
"I'm not super concerned about the everyday exposure in mountain or stream water or in the food. We can't escape it... we're just going to have to live with it."
I agree that it doesn't feel right to read a quote like, "I'm not super concerned about..." along with such a dire sounding headline.
Truth is stranger than fiction: it would have been more accurate for him to say "they're turning the frogs trans".
The only thing vague is the precise etiology. However, when it comes to legalizing irreversibly blanketing the planet in poisons, the onus should be on proving they are not the culprit, not the inverse.
'The average levels of the male hormone dropped by 1 percent a year, Dr. Thomas Travison and colleagues from the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Massachusetts, found. This means that, for example, a 65-year-old man in 2002 would have testosterone levels 15 percent lower than those of a 65-year-old in 1987.'
'Research carried out on Finnish and Danish populations has shown the same trend [1,6]. And even more recently, a large-scale study of Israeli men has shown how average testosterone levels have dropped between 2006 and 2019 [7] — by over 10% across almost every age category. '
'Testosterone deficiency has a prevalence of 10%-40% among adult males, and 20% among AYA men aged 15-39 years, he added.'
b) Both of those are taking drops over a certain period and then you're extrapolating back to my great grandad and assuming certain results, which is a bit tenuous. No to mention also assuming the cause.
Quite a long way away from a "non-controversial established fact."
Weight lifting increases it more than cardio.
[https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/fitness/quick-dos...]
More activity, and more muscle, leads to more testosterone.
More fat leads to more estrogen (and some other problematic hormones for men) - [https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/obe...]
We’re a nation in the midst of an obesity epidemic.
Also, sex also seems to increase testosterone. Participating much more than watching. For both genders. So more sex == more sex, generally.
[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325418]
Notably, we’re at record levels of sedentaryness in western society - and record levels of low sex.
Low sex IMO also partially due to high levels of narcissist abuse by society (and mothers) aimed at - well - everyone - coupled with little support or guidance on how to fight back.
Especially in younger folks.
Personally, I noticed schools phasing out recess, PT, and physical activity a long time ago. Steadily decreasing for almost 30 years. It’s gotten pretty bad, to the point now that many schools do almost none now. I’m sure everyone has noticed the ‘dads are incompetent losers’/predators schtick that’s been on TV for decades too.
The level of physical activity in most jobs has also been dropping.
Also, the widespread use of high SPF sunscreen, while likely reducing cancer rates, is also likely depressing vitamin D levels, in combination with the amount of sun most people are exposed is likely leading to subsets of the population (non supplementing) which seem highly correlated to neuroticism and mood regulation issues. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4496526/]
Anecdotally, I’ve seen no decrease in sex drive among active folks - and any following of news from the olympic villages shows similar behavior.
If anything, there is a pretty clear correlation between activity/health/sex (or at least sex drive). And always has been.
Personally, I’ve noticed a very strong correlation between seasonal weather patterns (aka winter) and everyone losing their minds (more), especially online, especially the last few years - as everyone has stayed at home more, and people are online more, staying single more, etc.
The big issue with this kind of problem is that it can be self reinforcing. Contagious even.
The best thing to do is get outside into nature, get some sun, exercise/lift heavy things, and have some good sex.
Easier said than done though eh? Especially when there is so much ‘crabs in a bucket’ going on.
Maybe it’s caused by endocrine disruptors - they certainly aren’t helping, and we should do what we can to remove them. But the elephant in the room is that our society has shifted in exactly the way one would expect would cause these issues too. And it correlates with the various mental health issues that are going nuts as well.
If you look at the daily habits and attributes of the population 100 years ago on these elements vs today - they couldn’t be more different.
So society, we need to get out, workout, and get laid if we want to be healthy.
Maybe PFAS really are a major problem, I don't know. But I'd love to see a bit more circumspection about this and other issues. Keeping people on red alert, all the time, about everything - does not seem like a recipe for human flourishing overall. Though it may be a good way to keep people under control.
It would help if we had some sort of mechanism to turn these "alerts" into action, which seems to be a sticking point for a globe dominated by society obsessed with corporate liberties to do nothing or double down on the problematic behavior.
The problem is that there's no requirement for demonstration of safety for new products/chemicals, not even monitoring, nothing (in most parts of the world). Which seems obviously bad.
But we currently live in a particularly idiotic mass-communication by memes times, hence we have defund the police and PFAS, and so on.
Children tend to be more physically active, and have higher surface area to volume ratios, so proportional to body mass their water intake must be higher.
Do we have any sense of the actual amount of PFAS in rainwater, and the human health impact of such? I didn't see any mention of this in the article. Maybe more investigation along these lines would be helpful.
As noted in the article, the EPA recently lowered the "safe limit" based on evidence that the previously acceptable levels were still high enough to reduce vaccine efficacy in children.
And we already know PFAS impact fertility and hormones, can cause some cancers, etc.
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.abm8868
(Method to destroy PFAs)
The new proposed EPA guideline is 4.0[1] parts per trillion (also expressed as ng/L) for PFOA and PFOS.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/and-polyfluoroalkyl-substances-pfas
(I don't remember if that was part of the books too, but in the show The Expanse, a major character who was born and lived on Ceres pondered this occasionally. In the end, he was told by an Earther that "it tastes like nothing, it's just water". I guess this is an improvement over status quo.)
dang? :)
That... still seems like an issue, to be honest. Not that you were saying it weren't, but... hmm. I wonder how much of a problem we're making for ourselves.
But, as the article noted, PFAS levels in humans are steady for now. So, the damage is probably already done.
Actual ones. Actual ones in use right mow in your neighborhood? In use on the water you're drinking today?
But at scale? For the rest of us?
I live in a "developing nation" [0] of 70 million people whose private water companies are fined billions every year because they cannot meet the most basic standards of supplying potable water and not dumping raw sewerage into the rivers and sea.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/britai...
That said, funding is now available to upgrade water treatment plants for PFAS.
Drinking untreated rainwater is a pretty bad idea [1], even without considering PFAS. A bird pooping on the surface you collect it from is enough to contaminate the tank with bacteria, parasites and/or viruses, and if you collect any kind of ground run-off it gets significantly worse. [2]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/rainwater-...
[2] https://novascotia.ca/nse/surface.water/docs/SurfaceWaterQA....
Sounds like a reverse osmosis filter works best.
I'd do it myself, but am le tired.
They attribute this to knowing that PFAS exist but that doesn’t really explain anything.
Maybe I’m missing something but this article (as written) seems like pseudo science.