March 10, the agency issued an action plan under the Toxic Substances Control Act involving:

• Adding BPA to the agency’s chemical Concern List.
• Ordering data collection on BPA in U.S. water supplies.
• Evaluating the reported disproportionate effect BPA has on children.
• Evaluating the effect on wildlife.
• Finding ways to reduce unnecessary BPA exposure and releases into the environment while further studies are being conducted.

I am happy to see this. Apparently 1 million pounds per year of BPA are released into the environment, and no one has been a watchdog for us. It’s about time.

Want to avoid BPA? Don’t eat canned food. Don’t touch credit card receipts. (I know, we have to touch them.)   And of course, don’t drink water or soda that has been stored in plastic bottles.

And where else are those one million pounds per year being used?  Somewhere else that impacts each of us, I bet!

Source: http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/bd4379a92ceceeac8525735900400c27/78110048d7f696d1852576f50054241a!OpenDocument

Drinking water contaminations have affected water piped to more than 49 million Americans since 2004, according to an  exhaustive study just completed by The New York Times.  And while the government is aware of the violations, it has rarely fined or punished the violators.

In its Dec 7 issue, the Times reported analyzing federal data on violations since 2004 of rules regulating toxins found in city water. These violations document illegal concentrations of chemicals, radioactive substances, or dangerous bacteria from sewage. More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems, often the smaller systems, broke the EPA regulations.

These violations were reported as they occurred. But only six percent of the water systems that broke the law received fines or other punishments from state or federal officials.  Some violations constituted one-time events, but others persisted for years, according to the Times.

Members of Congress, responding to the Times reporting, demanded an explantion from the EPA at a hearing Dec. 8. Enforcement leadership at the EPA is pledging to overhaul its system, according to ABC News.

The Safe Drinking Water Act violations have occurred in parts of each state. For example, in prosperous Ramsey, NJ, too-high concentrations were found of arsenic and tetrachlorethylene, a cleaning solvent. Both are linked to cancer. In New York State, 205 water systems were found to contain illegal amounts of bacteria.

Ramsey, NJ, was not fined–but it did update its filtration systems. In New York, just three water systems were penalized.

According to the Times, research indicates that diseases follow the contaminants and show that as many as 19 million Americans get sick each year from parasites, viruses, and bacteria found in drinking water.  And we all know cancer rates are rising; could this fact be related to increasing levels of carcinogens in our drinking water?

A home water filter is the best way to protect y our family, experts agree.  For the best of the best, get a Multi-Pure triple-carbon filter that’s certified to remove the most pollutants of any carbon filter, while leaving in beneficial minerals. Or, if you want to remove everything and add the beneficial minerals back in, you can get a Multi-Pure reverse osmosis system plus the carbon filter. Multi-Pure filters provide you with peace of mind and a warranty unmatched in the industry. I love mine. You’ll love yours too.

That’s a question the EPA is dodging, according to the watchdog Environmental Working Group. (See previous post.) This rocket fuel has been contaminating our waters since Cold War rocket launches and is “a potent thyroid toxin that may affect fetal and infant brain development,” according to the EWG article.

The EPA has been shielding defense contractors from the potential hundred-million-dollar cost of cleaning our waters, said the EWG, and continued to do so when the EPA last fall decided not to regulate perchlorate as a water pollutant.

In response to concerns expressed by scientists, the EPA in January issued a “health advisory” on perchlorate and asked for review of the issue from the National Academy of Sciences. Meanwhile, infants are getting too much perchlorate, from both the powdered formula and from the water used to mix it.  The perchlorate from the powdered formula comes from polluted water drunk by the cows, presumably.

The CDC study published in March “said that reconstituting cow’s milk/lactose formula with water contaminated with perchlorate at just 4 parts per billion (ppb) would cause 54 percent of the infants consuming the mix to exceed the so-called ’safe’ dose set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),” said the EWG. ” Many scientists contend that the EPA ’safe’ level is too high to protect public health.”

While all this politicking is going on, I am doing something to protect my family from pollutants: I got a triple-carbon filter for my tap water from Multi-Pure, the leading brand. I’m very happy with my durable unit. Check out a home water filter today!

The study was published in March by the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology. In it, Joshua G. Shier, of the CDC Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects, led a team that reported on testing 15 powdered infant formula brands. The study did not name the brands but said that just two of them acounted for 87 percent of the market in the US for powdered infant formula in 2000.

A summary at medicalnewstoday.com said that the study found perchlorate contamination in all brands, and that cow’s milk formulas contained significantly higher perchlorate contamination than soy and other formulas.

But the study conclusion that caught the public’s eye was the one that said the EPA safety limit may be exceeded when certain cow’s milk formulas are mixed with perchlorate-contaminated water, according to medicalnewstoday.com.

Perchlorate was spread across America during Cold War weapons testing and now contaminates food as well as drinking water. The compound also occurs naturally in small amounts.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) identifies perchlorate as a thyroid toxin that particularly affects infants and fetuses.

The EPA last year decided not to regulate perchlorate as a drinking water pollutant, according to the medicalnewstoday.com article.

I don’t know about you, but I am pretty concerned about the state of our tap water. I hope you consider a home water filter.