Here i go again

I have challenged in a non-scientific manner Save the Sound's presentation on Nitrogen. My apologies, because for 33 years i researched this and even spent some time setting up your lab for chlorophyll analysis in Stamford. So what can i say - levels of usable nitrogen remained low for all of the warm water season (above 50 F). This was Nitrogen as Nitrate and nitrite. The early spring "bloom" of algae was NOT repeated except in special cases in harbors and did not go out to the sound. The levels of plankton also remained low even when Oxygen levels were low. Studying the sediment, i found very interesting issues. The "muck" was extremely high in anaerobic bacteria and Iron and sulfides/sulfate. Very determined chemical oxygen scavengers. They are there because of years of untreated discharges from treatment plants.
The next issue is that all Nitrogen is food and the lack of the nitrogen in the water is creating a very clean, but lifeless Long Island Sound. The initial die-off (in large quantities) occurred after tropical storm Floyd, after which high quantities of Hydrogen Sulfide were detected in the Long Island Sound water as much as half a mile off the coast line.
The lack of recovery is possibly multi-faceted, but a lack of a healthy plankton population can not be ruled out. Plankton need nitrogen to grow and they provide food as a first step in the food chain.
While i have officially retired, the data was presented and not researched by anyone further, yet many other papers have been written talking of other causes, including phosphates, which is a distinct possibility since long Island Sound is neither fresh, nor completely Ocean salty . Facts and figures i can not provide, but if you want to really look at the causes, look everywhere not just what you are told.

long time - no post

I have lost a few followers,
but i retired from doing this work so my fingers are not so much in the "pie", so to speak.
However, i do get to crow about things i have said in the past and one has come up.
Uranium, i worried about it and radon.
I spoke about testing both.
I talked about getting a scintillation counter to at least do radon in the water.
It was all for naught.
When people talked about cancers, i worried, we were not testing or even telling people to test for things that might be a cause.
The big push for pesticides was not wrong, the minuscule scale of testing in other towns (10 per district) has shown nothing, but we had tested over 40 before and found nothing.
Radon was found in very high amounts in the 1990s in a particular area of Stamford.
The lab suggested testing for the base radioactive materials that cause radon, but nothing happened.
I worried and then a well came back at very high levels and i brought it up.
it took some years, but the state started recommending this testing and a revision in the pesticide testing ordinance has it being tested.
Very few people have signed up, but of those that have 70% have found uranium in their well water, 25% of these were over the US EPA's maximum contaminant level.
This is a real problem and people need to be aware and test and treat their well water if it is needed.
THIS IS all natural, this is not good.
The only way to protect yourself  is to test,  it is not expensive.
Do it!

Arsenic again

For a short while, the industry magazine i use to stay in touch with the world, Chemical and Engineering News, has been doing stories on Arsenic.

The latest link is included and the final say is that more testing is needed.

I can say that i am still concerned about Arsenic in all we eat, just as i feel we have been slowly destroying our world in the nonsense that we perpetuate.

More to be dome for sure.

Data Review

I hear many times that the "data" has not be scrutinized or analyzed at the Health Department,
The strange thing is that i did, back in July of 2012.
Not that it was a perfect analysis, but i compared all wells tested, wells showing the presence of pesticides with those not showing pesticides present.
What is this you say? show me?
Here is a general overview:

All well results since 2008 to 10/2012:   House Built Well depth well distance pool Onsite   Current land layout Past Land use       Average 1959 248 34   2 2 Max 2008 1100 200   6 6 Min 1700 30 0   1 1 count 1001 168 112 94 646 639 median 1962 195 25     2 1

The numbers for past land use and land layout are as follows:

ID #	Current Land	Past Land Use
1	Flat	undeveloped
2	gentle slope	Forest
3	moderate slope	Animal Farm
4	steep slope	Farm
5	Rolling Hills	Landscaping buisness
6	Hilly	Industrial

Data for the next categories are until July 2012, not Oct 2012

wells with pesticides found:

	House Built	Well depth	well distance	pool Onsite		Current land layout	Past Land use
Average	1952	210	26			2	1
Max	2007	800	81			4	4
Min	1730	30	0			0	0
count	149	35	34	11		72	69
median	1960	120	20			2	1

Wells without pesticides found:

	House Built	Well depth	well distance	pool Onsite		Current land layout	Past Land use
Average	1959	260	36			2	1
Max	2008	1100	200			6	4
Min	1735	30	0			0	0
count	640	102	66	47		325	300
median	1963	220	25			2	1

there are slight differences, but not statistically significant not do the difference correspond to changes in the use of the pesticides.

Sadly this does not show any way of determining if a home might have an issue or not - it varies by factors that we cannot determine, of course if someone would develop a time machine, we could see what was happening to cause these problems.  i do not think it would be that surprising.

And then there is good news...

in this grouping of the same magazine that keeps me informed of so much, they report that certain chemicals in Honey breaks down toxins and particularly pesticides.
Honey works in bees when they eat it, will it work in us?
probably, since the action is a chemical (enzymatic) one!

time to realize what is happening

Arsenic, how wide spread is it?
Recent statements by physicians and patients would indicate we must be worried about our water...
but is that the real story?

I was privy to research sometime ago which i posted concerning levels of arsenic in our favorite health foods, brown rice and dark chocolate.
Now my favorite magazine , Chemical and Engineering News (C & E N) has done much more in an article which tells all of us chemist to share the news.
This is really important, since even those of us with arsenic in our wells might be more effected in the HEALTHY foods we eat.
This is also scary and is not dissimilar to persons who  consumed large quantities of canned white albacore tuna (the expensive kind and supposedly better for you), who ended up with toxic levels of mercury.
The other canned tuna did not have those high levels and did not create such a problem.

I would hasten to add that much of the bacterial contamination in salad greens have come from ORGANIC PRODUCE.

Scary, isn't it?

This is also not dissimilar to cases of lead poisoning where the main exposure route was through a child eating lead paint!

Beware - if you are concerned about your health be very careful what you eat!

Complication of Epidemiology - Environmental factors

I'll start with the story of DDT and its effects on the top of the food chain in the avian  world.
DDT was never sprayed on the eagle, nor was it sprayed on the fish that the eagles eat,
nevertheless, the eggs had trace amounts of DDT in them and it affected the thickness of the shell causing the eggs not to mature.
The source?  Farmer spraying fields of plants, draining off into the streams, insects with DDT being consumed way down the food chain by small water dwelling animals, which were consumed by still larger fish until the size was large enough for an eagle to catch.
Think about it, that is a long way to travel.
We know, from other countries experience, that Arsenic can cause cancer, but at fairly high levels, but what about low levels?
We know from the non-smoking Uranium miners in Colorado and Utah that radon in very high levels can cause lung cancer.  Reports and studies on low levels when i studied them were mixed as were the studies on radon in water (even more so because some studies showed an inverse relation between cancer and high levels of radon in the water).
Then there was the study that the US EPA did on tree milling areas where there would be a very fine dust produced.  The study found that those workers who also worked producing methanol were not only NOT effected, but that the methanol vapors mitigated other factors such as smoking.
There is thee issue of asbestos, in the medium small particle range, causing a very bad disease, which is a direct cause and effect, or manganese which caused a mercury like brain problem when consumed in high quantities and of course a long history of problems with mercury itself.
Then we go to small levels of the next generation of pesticides after DDT, Aldrin (active component is dieldren) and chlordane.  Dieldren has been described in literature as something that would assist cancer production if there is something else which would cause cancer.  Chlordane is a concern for the endocrine system.
Now we get into the difficult stuff, pesticides have been found to effect immune systems at low levels and affect autoimmune diseases a generation down.
The issue with environmental factors is that they are complicated, small amounts of dieldren might not affect a person, but maybe their children or maybe a high dose of radon or a small dose of arsenic might be a trigger.
Eating process foods might be a factor.  Other pesticides in foods might be a factor.  Using chlorine bleach might be a factor.
Occupational exposure to ozone from a copier might be a factor or excess car exhaust from long commutes may play in to the equation.
One thing the US EPA did right is they talk about life time exposures to substances, but it can also be combination of things that could be factors.
This is why straight epidemiology does not work well in these situations, but it is the only tools we have.
This is complicated and direct connections are often hard to find.