California may be teaching us something about food and water quality.
If California is a bellwether state, its June 6th election results from one county may signal an emerging public health dilemma for the rest of the nation.
Kern County voters passed an ordinance, by 83 percent to 17 percent, banning the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer on county croplands. For decades, ever since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency restricted the ocean dumping of sewage sludge because it created 'dead zones,' Los Angeles County has trucked its sludge to
its northern neighbor for spreading on Kern County farm fields that produced wheat, corn and alfalfa.
Voters were disturbed by reports that the sludge – 450,000 tons of it a year -- contained hundreds of chemical toxins that could degrade air and water quality and possibly harm human health. Even before the vote, Los Angeles sanitation officials announced that if Kern residents didn't want their 'biosolids,' farmers had been found in Arizona who would take the waste.
What the vote highlights is not only the growing sewage disposal challenges faced by municipal governments nationwide, but the striking inability of wastewater treatment plants to remove many of the synthetic chemical toxins being produced by modern civilization. Neither wastewater plants nor drinking water purification plants are engineered to remove 'designer' chemicals.
The nation's tap water commonly contains chemicals such as PFOA, used to make Teflon, and perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel, both of which are also turning up in tests done on women's breast milk. Personal care products and pharmaceutical drugs release many of the more persistent chemicals into bodies of water.
In 2004 the U.S. Geological Survey tested streams and groundwater throughout the Western states and found antibiotics, steroids, prescription drugs, pesticides, and numerous other synthetic chemicals. Designer chemicals may be doing their jobs all too well, having become virtually indestructible.
Johns Hopkins University research released earlier this year found that 75 percent of bacteria-killing chemicals from anti-bacterial soaps flushed down household drains survived treatment at wastewater treatment plants. Much of that ends up in sewage sludge spread on farm land and citrus groves from California through the Midwest to Florida.
Just since the year 2000, an estimated 1,500 new antibacterial products have flooded the marketplace. Most contain triolocarban and triclosan, the two most prevalent and persistent bacteria killer chemicals. Both have been detected in the nation's waterways during U.S. Geological Survey water testing. Once in tap water, triclosan has been found to react with chlorine to produce chloroform and dioxins, both chemicals linked to cancer
in humans. Triclosan has been detected in women's breast milk and in aquatic life.
In Canada the environmental commissioner for Ontario, Gord Miller, described in March how his agency is finding dozens of drug chemicals -- including anti-depressants, painkillers and anti-inflammatories -- in that nation's drinking water supplies. "If you were designing the perfect pollutant it would probably look like a pill," Miller was quoted as saying. "Sewage treatment plants aren't designed to remove them."
One of the most frequently detected drug chemicals showing up in U.S. waters is acetaminophen, a widely used pain reliever. Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology have reported that when acetaminophen passes through wastewater plant treatments after being dumped into sewers or excreted from the bodies of users, it transforms into numerous new chemicals, at least two of which are toxic to humans.
This morphing phenomenon is being documented across an increasingly wide range of chemicals. Some morph into other compounds after being metabolized by the human body, while others develop new identities once processed through wastewater treatment and water purification processes. Many interact together to produce powerful synergies, a phenomenon that medical science has only just begun to study for its impact on human health.
Over the past two decades reproductive abnormalities have been showing up in fish populations exposed to synthetic chemical mixes in both North America and Europe. Numerous studies have found these chemicals are feminizing male fish, delaying reproduction in female fish, and damaging the livers and kidneys of both sexes. There is concern the same thing is happening among humans.
We are recycling chemical toxins through wastewater and back into tap water, then back into our bodies again. Most of the nation's beers and soft drinks are manufactured using municipal tap water and that may be providing still another source for ingesting traces of these chemicals.
A recent report prepared for the state legislature by the California Policy Research Center warned that Americans "are being inundated with chemicals that are causing an array of problems for health and the environment." Citing statistics compiled by the EPA, the study described how the U.S. produces or imports 42 billion pounds of synthetic chemicals each day. That is the daily equivalent to filling 623,000 gasoline trucks which, if placed from end to end, would stretch from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.
No one can escape these chemicals. Traces of them are even being found in the blood of humans and wildlife living in Arctic regions. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has tested thousands of Americans for chemical contamination since 1999, every person carries a 'body burden' of hundreds of these synthetics that we have absorbed from our foods, medicines and consumer products.
Everyone on the planet has become a guinea pig in this vast chemical experiment that generates the conveniences of modern life. What is slowly being revealed are the multiple ways in which these chemicals may be redefining what it means to be human.