Posted by Larry Hoover on March 8, 2009, at 7:00:38
In reply to Re: How Inflammatory Disease Can Cause Fatigue » Neal, posted by garnet71 on March 3, 2009, at 23:17:30
> Have you ever heard of endocrine disrupters?
I have. That's my specialty. I'm an environmental toxicologist, and I did a lot of work for the World Wildlife Fund on this subject. I focussed on nonylphenol ethoxylates, which used to be found in detergents, and bisphenol A, which is recently in the news. We were able to show that very low concentrations of NPE induced male fish to grow eggs in their testes. Your detergent is different today than it was fifteen years ago, in part because of work we did at the WWF. If you do a search on my name you'll find a lot of stuff I did on endocrine disruption.
> Then there are all the medications that are in all of our drinking water. How could they not affect us?
Again, part of my focus as a scientist. What is important to understand is that our ability to detect trace contaminants has increased dramatically over the last couple of decades. One of the first reports in the lay press, "Prozac in drinking water" in the U.K. rag the Guardian was totally fabricated. I checked the original data, and contacted the research team. There was no Prozac detected.
The biggest risk of drinking water contamination arise on rivers. One man's sewage becomes the next man's drinking water. The most commonly found drug-like contaminants are caffeine and acetominophen, but you'd have to drink hundreds of thousands of litres to obtain a dose that would affect you, if your body could even absorb any of it, at that dilution. That holds true for the pharmaceuticals that are sometimes found, also. The only real drug class of concern are female hormones, especially from birth control pills. The synthetic estrogens they contain are engineered to have a much longer biological half-life so women can take a pill once a day (the normal half-life of estrogen in the body is measured in seconds). Because of the molecular modifications, they also do not degrade in the body, and cannot be degraded by bacteria in sewage treatment plants. The estrogens enter the environment in the STP outflow. Hormones are powerful substances, and this estrogen does enter the environment at concentrations that can affect organisms. Dilution takes care of that pretty quickly, though, but there is a zone of environmental impact nonetheless.
I've got to get on my commitment to write a long reply on vitamin D RDA, so I don't want to go on too long here.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:883457
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090304/msgs/884363.html