What's in the water?
What's in the Water?
The Washington Post(Excerpt of article)
Are all those chemicals in our food, our water and our air poisoning us?
The answer, according to a long and disturbing article in the winter issue of On Earth magazine, is: probably."There are now more than 100,000 synthetic chemicals on the market, and these chemicals are everywhere," writes Gay Daly. "They are in our food supply, so we eat them. They drift on the air, so we breathe them. . . . Ubiquitous in cosmetics, they are absorbed through our skin. Pregnant women pass them to their fetuses; mothers feed them to their newborns when they breastfeed."
What are all these chemicals doing to us?
Well, the final results of this unsupervised experiment on the human species are not in yet. But, as Daly demonstrates, thousands of studies done on animals indicate that many of these chemicals affect the body's endocrine system, possibly causing brain damage, thyroid malfunctions, genital deformities and reproductive failures.
The reproductive problems are potentially the most dangerous. "We need to ask ourselves if we are going to be reproducing as a species or not," says Pat Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University.
On Earth is published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent environmental group, so you can say they're just a bunch of crazy tree-huggers and ignore the story if you're so inclined.
But Daly, a former editor at the science magazine Discover, has written an article that is painstaking researched, carefully written and not sensationalized. It's also scarier than hunting with Dick Cheney, particularly if you happen to be one of those sentimental fools who wants the human race to go on propagating itself.
The Washington Post(Excerpt of article)
Are all those chemicals in our food, our water and our air poisoning us?
The answer, according to a long and disturbing article in the winter issue of On Earth magazine, is: probably."There are now more than 100,000 synthetic chemicals on the market, and these chemicals are everywhere," writes Gay Daly. "They are in our food supply, so we eat them. They drift on the air, so we breathe them. . . . Ubiquitous in cosmetics, they are absorbed through our skin. Pregnant women pass them to their fetuses; mothers feed them to their newborns when they breastfeed."
What are all these chemicals doing to us?
Well, the final results of this unsupervised experiment on the human species are not in yet. But, as Daly demonstrates, thousands of studies done on animals indicate that many of these chemicals affect the body's endocrine system, possibly causing brain damage, thyroid malfunctions, genital deformities and reproductive failures.
The reproductive problems are potentially the most dangerous. "We need to ask ourselves if we are going to be reproducing as a species or not," says Pat Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University.
On Earth is published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent environmental group, so you can say they're just a bunch of crazy tree-huggers and ignore the story if you're so inclined.
But Daly, a former editor at the science magazine Discover, has written an article that is painstaking researched, carefully written and not sensationalized. It's also scarier than hunting with Dick Cheney, particularly if you happen to be one of those sentimental fools who wants the human race to go on propagating itself.
posted by pop at 2:06 PM
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