Just today, MSNBC reported that in some parts of the US, the water supply is found to be tainted with pharmaceuticals.

How safe is your city's drinking water? Do you know? Now, it is not just the government and the utilities companies that might keep such information all hush hush. Researchers too keep such information quiet for fear of public panic. Is there then, any point then writing to them to ask for information? I thought I'd try anyway. Keep you posted if there's a reply.

So what if all the pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, endocrine disruptors*, pesticides, and other stuff people flush away get recycled and reintroduced into the water supply again can cause reproductive problems, birth defects, cancer, messed up med cocktails, and other nasty things? Well, if the wheel of life stops turning, we'll all go extinct in a few generations.

Well-documented in Our Stolen Future, scientists found that sperm counts have halved every 20 years in the last 80 years. They have found endocrine disruptors and a truckload of other industrial chemicals in the bodies of animals like polar bears as far north as the Arctic. This stuff does cumulative damage over generations so the contaminants from my grandma's body passed to my mom to me has trebled (plus all the crap I have been eating pre-pregnancy too). All this can hijack your genes and affect gene expression, amongst other things.

While I have been focusing on the food we have been eating and the plastic bottles** we have been drinking from (learn to read your plastics - see below), I conveniently forgot about our water supply from which so many things are not being filtered out. Apparently the only method of filtering out everything is reverse osmosis plus an activated carbon filter. But I'll have to check that one out more thoroughly.

If we don't fix this, life could very well go extinct in a matter of generations. Oh yes, there's that global warming thing too.

* Endocrine disrupting chemicals alter development of the fetus in the womb by interfering with the natural hormonal signals directing fetal growth. Their impacts, sometimes not detectable until years or decades after exposure, include reduced disease resistance, diminished fertility and compromised intelligence and behavior (quote from Our Stolen Future).

** Avoid using plastic bottles, especially for your children. Learn to id the types of plastic from looking under the bottle for the triangle recycling label with a number inside.

Sources:
Our Stolen Future
What you need to know about plastics and your food
Which plastic water bottles don't leach chemicals?
Updated repeat after me: "No more plastic bottles, or #7 plastic, or things that leach BPA or aluminum..."
Toxic Plastic Baby Bottles
The Hundred Year Lie

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