The Colbert Report is not my usual source of news, but this is interesting. Stephen Colbert’s guest last night was Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway) who presented his Vapor Compression Distiller. The distiller is a chemical, membrane, and filter free water purifier. Kamen claims the box draws pure drinkable water from oceans, poison, a 50-gallon drum of urine, anything. It is designed to require little maintenance and uses no chemicals or filters. The purifier can produce 10 gallons of water an hour on 500 watts of electricity.
If true the potential here is astounding. Forget OLPC, kids in Africa don’t need computers, they need access to potable water. But apparently Kamen’s purifier does not yet have outside verification of its reliability. I want know if this is legitimate. How does it work precisely? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
A study of scientists in the journal Oikos reports a strong correlation between drinking and scientific success (measured by published papers). The worst part:
The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.
This is almost enough to make me stop drinking. FromNYT.
Like many people I was once a devotee of the Brita water filter. Now I just drink straight tap water.
One day I was at the sink filling the pitcher, and just as I finished and was turning to return the now full pitcher to the fridge, the cat decided it would be a good time to attack my pant leg. This of course resulted in me dropping, and breaking the pitcher. No more Brita. I put the broken Brita in a corner of the kitchen and forgot about it for a few days. In the meantime I debated buying a new pitcher, drank straight tap water, and did some research.
Filtered water is not noticeably safer or healthier. Most people filter their water because it makes the water taste better, and they think it removes the “bad stuff” from the water. In reality, unless you buy an expensive filtration system, your simple fridge or tap filter isn’t doing much. Most filters are just activated carbon and maybe an ion exchange resin (to reduce heavy metal ions in the water). The big sell is that they remove lead from your tap water. In the United States lead in drinking water is already limited to 15ppb. And in many places it is a lot less (i.e. undetectable). My point - the amount of lead in tap water is so low your filter isn’t doing anything.
What about taste? Its true, filtered water does taste better. But only if you’re drinking it side by side with straight tap water. At first, after my pitcher broke, the difference was very noticeable. But after three days, I could not detect any taste at all - no hint of copper or chlorine. In fact, it tasted just as good as filtered water had before.
Bacteria in your Brita. Have you ever examined one of your old filters when you’re replacing it? Nice and damp and aerated, and after a couple months your filter becomes a bacteria breeding ground. An old, unchanged Brita filter can be dangerous because it may add bacteria, which had been killed in the tap by chlorine, back into water in your pitcher. There are other health benefits in tossing your Brita. Brita pitchers are made from styrene methyl methacrylate copolymer. The EPA has described styrene as “a suspected carcinogen” and “a suspected toxin to the gastrointestinal, kidney, and respiratory systems.”
Cost savings and environmental damage. Annual savings of $50-70 in replacement filters. Plus you’re making the environment happy by foregoing all that plastic.
Siel over at Emerald City, and many other people, advocate using water filters. I say try just straight tap water for a week.
The news that there are a host of pharmaceuticals in our drinking water has got everyone talking about water. I agree with Stats Blog that we should chill out until there is more information available. Switching to bottled water doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
In many cases bottled water is just reconstituted tap water,
The bottles leach worse chemicals (phthalates) into your water,
Producing, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles is bad for the environment.
I’ll stick with tap water and my Sigg bottle for now. On that note Angry Toxicologist reports from Seattle that Bisphenol A still sucks, so stay away from those Nalgene bottles. More on plastic water bottle types here, metal or glass is still the best bet.
If you really want to learn about water check out EWG and NRDC, and EHSO.
In the Washington Post yesterday Donna Jackson Nakazawa discussed the rise of autoimmune diseases. I was just going to give the bottom line, but the article had too much good (scary) information. Read it yourself.
Here are some highlights:
Nakazawa, interviewed medical experts around the country and they almost unanimously agreed that our daily exposure to environmental toxins is a major trigger of autoimmune diseases.
Over the past 40 years, rates of Type 1 diabetes have increased fivefold; in children 4 and under, it’s increasing 6 percent a year.
The CDC sampled 2,500 people nationwide looking for the amount of chemicals and pollutants each individual carried. They found traces of all 116 chemicals and pollutants they tested for, including PCBs, insecticides, dioxin, mercury, cadmium and benzene, all highly toxic in higher doses.
Those who work with pesticides, textiles, solvents, benzene, asbestos and other compounds are significantly more likely to develop and die from an autoimmune disease.
Finally, I love that she mentions the precautionary principle - something we seem to have forgotten about in America. Where the European Union has implemented legislation requiring companies to develop safety data on 30,000 different chemicals, the US is still awaiting action from Congress.
From the LA Times via thedailygreen . Here is all you need to know:
Nearly half the supposedly “natural” or “green” soaps shampoos and other consumer products tested by the Organic Consumers Association have an ingredient that could cause cancer, according to a new report.
And
But it’s also a reminder that toxicity is a tricky issue, and ridding your daily life of all potential carcinogens is impossible.
Slate covers the Airborne settlement and why taking Airborne may help you even if it cannot be clinically proven (it is a variant of the placebo effect - it works because you believe it will). Get your money back from Airborne here
