Dec. 9, 2011

9/14/92 #2    HATONN

CONTINUATION: FEAR OF FAUCETS - VIRUSES VS. BACTERIA

Viruses do, after all, have distinct advantages over bacteria because of their tiny size and durability.  If a bacterium were, say, the size of a football field, a typical virus would be only the size of a football.  The ordinary sand filters that most water-treatment plants use reliably stop larger bacteria, but as many as 5 percent of the viruses pass right through.  To truly reduce viral numbers, the EPA requires water companies to use a multiple-step process.

The EPA rules tell the nation's 54,000 water suppliers they should reduce the number of viruses to no more than 1/10,000    of the source waters' original concentration.  It's a curious mandate--local plants must precisely reduce the numbers of something they never actually measure.

[Editor's note:  Go back and read that last statement again. This is what science and engineering have deteriorated to and why I--Ed Young--have gotten out of it to hopefully do some good through this newspaper.]

The EPA's 1989 Surface Water Treatment Rule exempts plants from having to test or count viruses in any way.  Instead, plant operators spend $75 million yearly assiduously counting an old standby bacterium called coliform, in larger systems sometimes hourly.  The problem is, coliform bacteria are next-to-useless indicators of waterborne viruses.

The theory has long been that although disease, they often show up when disease-causing sewage bacteria has leaked into water.  So utilities dump chlorine into the input water and the coliforms vanish.  By doing so, utilities meet the EPA's microbe-destroying requirement.  Day in and day out, bored water technicians keep testing chlorinated water to find fecal coliform.  What about viruses?  From New Orleans to Newark no water company technician tests for them so there is no record of any "problems".

 

SHABBY REGULATIONS AND PHONY ARITHMETIC LEAVE WATER IMPURE

To meet the letter of the law--1/10,000 the virus numbers originally in the source water--EPA rules allow water utilities to choose from a sampler of technologies which--on paper--should reduce virus numbers adequately.  Filter your water, the EPA says, and they'll credit utilities with reducing viruses a 100-fold.  Multiply these two reductions together and, voila, utilities can claim they've reduced viruses by 10,000 times--a mathematically-derived 99,--percent reduction.  And no technician ever need raise a test-tube to be sure the system's working.

Of course, the dirtier the source, the more trouble treatment plants have producing uncontaminated drinking water, but right now the EPA doesn't require cities using even the filthiest river water to add extra disinfectant or filtration--in fact, no more is required of those cities' plants than from, say, mountain springs.

"We recognize that the minimum required under the rule would probably not be adequate for systems with heavy fecal contamination", says Stig Regli, regulation manager at the EPA's Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water.  "One thing that we're considering at the EPA is developing an eventual amendment to the Surface Water Treatment Rule which would require higher levels of total treatment with poor quality source water."

The smart money says that it won't be earlier than the mid-1990's before the EPA's ponderous process of hearings, rehearings and legal paperwork can fix the present law--if the next administration makes it a priority.

California water supplies, on the whole, are far less polluted with human waste than many U.S. rivers.  San Francisco, with its aqueduct drawing from the Sierra's Hetch Hetchy reservoir, faces negligible human waste disinfection problems.  On the other hand, many cities along the Sacramento and San Joaquin River systems--like Fresno, Sacramento and Redding--dump their treated waste into waters that eventually wind up in the delta.  From Contra Costa County to Southern California (via the State Water Project) a maze of local water plants depend upon theoretical estimates of the effectiveness of filtering viruses out of that delta water.

"In the literature, people have written that water plants should reduce viruses (to 1 billionth of the original number)", notes Payment.  "So you should have no viruses left.  That is theoretical.  In practice, the filtration plant is imperfect."

Payment knows this firsthand because, in the jargon of researchers, he's done the wet work.  In 1985, he found seven Quebec water-treatment plants passing about one virus per every 1,000 liters of treated drinking water.  Some tap-water samples has not one, but 10 to 20 viruses.

Jack Demarco, superintendent of the Water Quality Water Works, says that smaller systems may inevitably fail to follow rigorous technical standards in caring for sand filters.  "Sometimes", he says, "small systems misoperate by improper cleaning."

One seemingly obvious solution is simply to kill viruses by pouring in still more disinfectants like chlorine.  But when chlorine is added to raw water containing organic matter, it forms tiny amounts of a family of potentially cancer-causing by-products.  Utilities and the EPA won't permit still-higher chlorine concentrations.  Utilities that hope to counteract viruses in their source water must begin thinking of novel--and sometimes-experimental --disinfection technologies.  Cost of these new technologies varies, but in general it's just a few percent of the billions of dollars cities spend to operate waterworks.

And it's not as if river water has been getting filthier and filthier.  Mississippi water, for example, has far fewer of those indicator-bacteria, fecal coliform, than years ago, thanks largely to the 1974 Clean Water Act, which forced U.S. cities to treat their sewage before discharging it into rivers and lakes.  What is new is virologists' awareness that sewage treatment plants aren't nearly as good at virus killing as once believed.  "What I find the most difficult about sewage", says Betty Olson, a professor and chair of Environmental Analysis and Design at the University of California at Irvine, "is that a few studies were done back in 1974 and showed there were no viruses in [sewage plant] secondary effluent--and the EPA put the matter to rest.  Now we have tests that are five times more sensitive than they had--and yet we have blinders on which don't encourage us to test for viruses today. [Editor's note: Wonder why?!]

Before any war against viruses can be launched, water scientists insist the Montreal experiment must be redone in other cities. The new experiments are necessary to resolve several criticisms of Payment's study, particularly that the Montreal source water--which contains untreated sewage--was much more contaminated than U.S. water.

But was the Quebec River water that much dirtier than U.S. water?  The numbers say NO.  There were 57,000 coliforms/liter in Montreal, but 44,000 last year in Cincinnati, and 30,000 to 50,000 just above New Orleans.  Montreal's water is dirty, all right, but not much dirtier than thousands of miles of U.S. rivers.  "Clearly, I think the virus and coliform in Montreal [rivers] are probably something you could find in Missouri and Mississippi and some of our larger waterways", agrees Joan Rose, a virologist in the University of South Florida.

Back at the Institute of Virology in Montreal, Pierre Payment is planning the decisive experiment.  He would measure illnesses in two matched cities, on with high numbers of viruses known to be in river water, the other with few or no viruses.  If he can show that there is the same incidence of disease in both cities, then the problem is not caused by viruses.  "Right now", he says ruefully, "I'm trying to get the money to do the study."

"I think we have to validate the research that Payment has produced", says Alfred Defour, director of the EPA's Microbiology Research Division in Cincinnati.  "If it's repeated, with similar results, then I think we have to be concerned that there's something in our treatment process that isn't catching these pathogens, whatever they are."

Defour's group at the EPA's Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory in Cincinnati may be the first to reproduce Payment's experiments, if it can cobble together enough money from various agencies.  It may be 1994 before an experiment is under way and the slow pace of the EPA research irritates come in the research community.  [Editor's note: For the rest of us, it only confirms that purposeful foul play is afoot.]

"The EPA has tables of research on toxins, on pesticides, but right now, we have just one table on coliforms, which tells us nothing about what harmful organisms are in water and what the risk is", says Rose, who blames poor support for research from the Reagan and Bush administration.  Under Reagan the EPA cited cost when it dropped out from funding half of Payment's Montreal experiment.

"The EPA has a water-research budget for water", says Betty Olson of UC Irvine.  "They put $775,000 into protozoa, viruses and bacteria--and $20 MILLION into chemicals.  We may be spending millions of dollars going after mice and letting the elephants get through."

Privately, scientists who study drinking water are aghast at the poverty of funds for water research--the United States still hasn't been able to fund $1 million to repeat Payment's experiment--and wealth of private spending for household water systems.  Each year, they point out, private citizens spend $640 million for in-home water treatment--fully a third more than the EPA's entire national drinking water budget.

Since Payment published his research--focusing late 20th-century science on 19th century water-treatment technology--a few water engineers have begun wondering how to redesign plants, a few epidemiologists have started to talk about follow-up studies, and a few Washington regulators are beginning to pay more attention to viruses.  "Certainly a study like Payment's is eye-opening", sums up the EPA's Stig Regli.  "There's a revolution going on with microbiological risk assessment right now. ... It's changing our perception of what may be in the water."

END OF QUOTING FEAR OF FAUCETS.

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Good luck citizens--the plan is to have the world depopulated down to not more than 550 million people by the turn of the century. That comes from the Elite LIPS of one George Bush of the New World Order.  Indeed, good luck--most of you will be quite DEAD by the time the government acts--for they are the ones who have done it TO YOU.

Please stay tuned and read the next articles relative to this subject--and by the way, do have a good day, IF you live through it.

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More Than Just 'Stomach Flu'

 

9/14/92 #3   HATONN

 

(Editor's note: This is the first of two auxiliary articles to the page 19 main story on water contamination.)

QUOTING:

In order for the viruses in tap water to sicken water-drinkers, they must pass through the stomach's corrosive acid environment. Only a few dozen intrepid viruses have evolved that have the ability to survive the journey.  [H: Of course with the pushing of antacids you have provided a nice comfortable rest-bed for the little varmints, removing all difficulty in survival and allowing passage undaunted right on out through the intestinal system and directly back into your drinking water after a nice vacation journey--unless of course, they have to stop and multiply and divide in some loving host body--then bunches more are provided into the water supply of loving friends and neighbors every time you "flush".]   These survivor viruses, however, are worrying epidemiologists because they're increasingly linked to serious, disabling human diseases.

As a group they're known as enteroviruses and they can cause disease from mild queasiness to killing heart failure.  Because the outer coat they evolved to protect themselves from stomach acid also helps protect them against chlorine, the most common chemical used to disinfect tap water; enteroviruses are a significant source of waterbourne disease.  To finish off some enteroviruses may take hundreds, even thousands of time more chlorine, and much more time than it takes to kill ordinary bacteria.

These hardy enteroviruses may be the most dangerous life forms surviving modern water treatment.  That's disturbing because current research is linking some of the 73 known human enteroviruses (Poliovirus, Coxsackie virus, Calicivirus, Echovirus, Rotavirus, Norwalk virus, Hepatitis) to long-term, serious illnesses.  The most compelling evidence implicates Coxsackie virus, linked to a devastating form of heart disease in which the heart becomes enlarged, flabby and weakened--dilated cardiomyopathy, currently the chief cause of heart transplantation.  The virus seems to trigger a post-infectious autoimmune disease that can eventually result in heart damage and death.

These findings aren't just important to ivory-tower researchers:  More than half of all people receiving heart transplantation originally became sickened by viral infection of Coxsackie virus.

"For some of these viruses, years may pass between initial exposure and symptoms", said Rose.  That long duration makes it easy to understand why it's been extremely difficult for scientists to link, say a flu-like illness one day with serious disease months or years later.  The true frequency and origins of many enterovirus infections, masked until now, remain to be discovered.

Consumers concerned about possible microbial contamination of their drinking water have a number of options.  [Editor's note: None of these suggestions are effective against viruses.]

*  Have your water tested.  Many independent laboratories will test for toxins and bacteria.

*  If you have a carbon filter, change the carbon at least as frequently as the manufacturer suggests.

*  In the morning run the water for at least half a minute before taking a drink. 

*  Be certain that all faucets to which garden hoses are attached are fitted with an anti-siphon device to prevent a reverse flow hose to indoor plumbing.

*  Call the local water utility and get a free copy of its latest water quality report.  The report will list levels of coliform bacteria and chemical pollutants found in tap-water samples.  The utility engineers may also be able to provide you with a rough idea of the coliform count in source water.  If the number is above about 10,000 total coliforms per liter, the source water is roughly as contaminated as that in Payment's experiments.

*  If you decide to buy a home water-treatment unit, an excellent reference is the January 1990 Consumer Reports "Fit to Drink" article.

*  Don't confuse distilled water with sterile water.  Distilled water is not chlorinated and has been shown to be frequently contaminated with bacteria.

*  Bottled water may be purer than tap water, but some city-manufactured bottle waters may contain more bacteria than plain tap water.  Other bottled waters may be a better bet--if you can determine your local brand's water source.

*  For additional information, consult the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Hotline at (800) 426-4791, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST.

[RM:  Fast-forward 20 years from the time of Dr. Pierre Payment's report: Raw tap-water in America remains polluted with chlorine and other harmful chemicals, dissolves solids, bacteria and viruses and tastes bad; proof that there is has been a concerted effort to prevent his findings from being used for the health benefit of our society.  We know that chlorine in poisonous; we know that there are harmful bacteria and viruses in tap-water and yet they have done nothing about these things. Therefore, in the U.S. the old adage applies; "don't drink the tap-water"!.  

In the U.S. there are now water-filtering machines in many retail locations, 9-stage water filtering stores in may cities and towns, and dozens of under-the-sink water-filtering systems available for purchase that will purify tap water, thus making it safe and palatable to drink, temporarily.  But there still is not a commonly-known method of water stabilization once the water has been filtered.  Bacteria starts growing in water after 48 hours of being purified unless it is refiltered, oxygenated or stabilized in some way.  Why does this occur?  Because bacteria and viruses are in the air and on surfaces of everything that is not constantly sterilized.  In addition, the filtering process has removed the chlorine that was added to tap-water to prevent some bacteria from breeding. (See article below.) So, what to do? 7-10 drops 35% food-grade Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) in a gallon of water kills all bacteria and virus in less than 10 minutes.

I learned about the use of 35% food-grade Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) from reading an article in a 'Phoenix Liberator' newspaper, and for the past 20 years I have purified/stabilized filtered tap-water I drink with 35% food-grade Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2); 10 drops per gallon.  The taste of this drinking-water is so good that I have never considered drinking unfiltered or untreated tap-water since. It also stabilizes stored drinking-water indefinitely, although it is recommended that stored drinking-water, even treated with H202, be recycled every 6 months.  But the biggest benefit to me has been that I stopped getting sick with flu viruses, which prior to using H2O2 I would get sick approximately once a year. 35% food-grade H2O2 has truly been a godsend and I would recommend it for everyone.  For those who have yet to try this product, will you achieve the same results I did?  I don't know.  But you will never know unless you try it.  You have nothing to lose and, perhaps, a more balanced physical state of being to gain.  There are websites available which list many other uses for the product besides purification-stabilization of drinking-water.]

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A Filter That Breeds Bacteria

(Editor's note: This the second of two auxiliary articles to the page 19 main story on water contamination.)

 

Consumers who have bought or who have been considering buying reverse osmosis filters might want to know that Pierre Payment recently discovered an unexpected bacterial problem with many of them.  Designed to remove bacteria from tap water, they can also breed it--in staggering quantities.

Under-the-sink reverse-osmosis filters usually pass water first through a carbon filter to remove chlorine and other chemicals and then through a membrane that excludes everything but pure water.  Since the membrane filters water at a rate of one gallon every three to six hours, the water is usually stored in a two-gallon holding tank under the sink until it's needed.  That's the problem.

The water in the tank has been stripped of the residual chlorine that water plants add to stop bacterial growth in pipes.  Sitting stagnate at room temperature often for days in the tank is an ideal breeding ground for bacteria.  And breed they do.  Payment measured an average of 10,000 bacteria per milliliter of tank water, some units breed up to 10 million bacteria per milliliter.  "Those consumers were drinking water that contained more bacteria than milk", says Payment.

"I was surprised", the Canadian virologist remembered.  He discovered that once a filter grows bacteria, it would continue growing them in about the same numbers for months.  He published his findings in the April 1991 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

The bacteria growing in the filter weren't ones we see too often" he says.  His team grew the bacteria in the lab, and watched as beige, yellow and sometimes pinkish splotches spread across their petri dishes.  The main species--pseudomonas acinetobacter, fiavobacterium, alcaligenes moruxella--were known to other researchers and presumed harmless.

Payment's statistics suggested otherwise.  People drinking water from filters contaminated with fewer than 1,000 bacteria per milliliter are known to be coming down with gastroenteritis--about what you would expect from the normal population.  But a third of the filters grew microbe-ladened water with 100,000 or more bacteria per milliliter.  People who drank the water, Payment found, averaged five bouts of gastroenteritis each year--10 times what people drinking unfiltered tap water experienced.  Their $1,000 filter had given them diarrhea rates like those in the Third World.

If it weren't for these extra filter-bred illnesses, Payment's Montreal experiment might have shown even greater differences in illness between the filtered and unfiltered groups--more like 35 to 40 percent.  If he can ever conduct a repeat test with biologically pure water--a technical challenge--he may be able to pin down the exact level of sickness that tap water can produce.

The Quebec researchers stumbled onto a major regulatory oversight--home water treatment devices are barely regulated by the government.  "The major problem is that nobody tests the filters microbiologically once they are installed", says Payment.  They're installed and then forgotten.  The salesman says, "change the filter every six months, and that's it."

The #100 million home reverse-osmosis filter industry has more than doubled since 1985.

"We've seen research that the human body is fully capable of tolerating higher amounts of bacteria", counters Peter Censky, executive director of the Chicago-based Water Quality Association, representing 2,600 manufacturers/services of water treatment devices.  "Empirically, you consume much more bacteria from your table, your face, your skin.  But the question is still open because we don't know enough about the physiology of drinking water."

Last December, Congress' General Accounting Office was far more critical of home water treatment units.  "No single authority", the GAO reported, "exists to ensure that units perform as sales agents claim."  [H: Now, if you believe the GAO would "help you by more regulations then I do have another bridge to sell you in New York.]  Calling federal regulation of the units "fragmented and incomplete", the GAO recommended that the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the EPA and industry coordinate a strategy to regulate the effectiveness and safety of the home units.  [H: Oh boy, that should insure that no one ever gets safe water again in a lifetime.]

Certainly units like the one used in Quebec are in dire need of regulation.  Though about 600 manufacturers make home water treatment units, only 54 to date have gotten around to having the Water Quality Association certify their units.  Ironically, even that certification (the "Prestigious Gold Seal" in association literature) fails to test reverse-osmosis units for bacterial contamination.

Instead, the Gold Seal is earned if the unit merely filters out dissolved solids, doesn't leak under pressure and isn't composed of toxic materials.  Water Quality Association literature--while stressing that these units can filter tap water bacteria--never mention that the filters often produce water containing up to 100,000 times more bacteria than the incoming tap water.

Payment's 1991 research paper on the filters concluded:  "These observations raise concerns for the possibility of increased disease associated with certain point-of-use treatment devices for domestic use when high levels of bacterial growth occur."

"We want to repeat Pierre's study", said microbiologist Marc LeChevalier, senior research microbiologist with the industry's American Water Works Service Company.  "Reverse-osmosis is a good system--just the way its implemented may need to be modified.  You've got to recirculate that water to keep it from sitting stagnant."

END OF QUOTING.

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I am quite sure we will again be blasted with "you fear mongers" and other nasty attacks.  I, too, sometimes do not know why we and this crew "bother", but here it is.  I ask that you take it of leave it, call if our staff can assist you but spare us your politics and religious put-down.  You as a whole are in dire circumstances and what you do with this information is solely up to you.  This is purely and simply offered as a public service in information.  Shouting denials at our crew will merit you nothing but embarrassment as the truth projects itself.  You have aiders and abetters of the NEW WORLD ORDER in your midst--knowing or unknowing--and I believe it is time you people open your dreamy eyes and look around you for your time is running out quickly. Salu.

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Source: THE PHOENIX LIBERATOR, September 15, 1992, Volume 20, Number 9.

http://www.phoenixarchives.com/liberator/1992/0992/091592.pdf

 

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The 2008 NWRI Distinguished Speaker, Dr. Pierre Payment, gave the plenary lecture at CCIW on February 11, 2008, in association with the 43^rd Central Canadian Symposium on Water Quality Research. His lecture was titled "Public Health and Drinking Water Standards: Are We Doing More Harm than Good?" Professor Payment is an internationally respected expert in water treatment and microbiology with current research activities centered on the health effects of drinking water. Returning to Montreal in 1975, he was appointed to INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier, a research institute of the University of Québec , where he is now a full professor. The studies of Professor Payment and colleagues opened a new line of research on the contribution of the drinking water distribution system to the population burden of endemic microbial gastrointestinal disease. As an expert in water and health, he has advised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the World Health Organization, Health Canada , the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Walkerton Commission. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the United States and Canada International Joint Commission (Great Lakes), the American Public Health Association, the American Society for Microbiology, the American Water Works Association, Reseau environment (Quebec), the Canadian Water Quality Association, the International Water Association, the Societe canadienne des microbiologists, and is a life-time fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.