Wasting Time With Alex

Monday, March 10, 2008

Talk about exagerations…

Alarmists are at it again. What is the big problem this time?

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

Holy crap! This is some scary news. The consequences would be devastating on these poor people’s health and could have repercussions that would doom the same people for generations to come. Except…

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

At the risk of completely removing any seriousness from this argument - and that is exactly what should happen as this is plain and simple silly people hyping up a non-issue - let me point out that panicking about these below trace amount levels of contaminants is like panicking because you discover that there are minute traces of fart gas, at levels so small that you can’t even smell them, in the air we breath. Now, one could make the argument that farts are not toxic, but that’s a question of degrees. Farts are nothing but a nuisance precisely because the concentration of the chemicals is sow low that the worst it does when we get enough dosage is smell nasty and gross you out. But in a close room where the concentration gets increased the gas can become dangerous. The issue is that level of concentration needed to make it dangerous is enormous.

And that’s why this entire story is nothing but bull. Parts per billion or trillion? How many millions of gallons of this contaminated water would you have to chug in record time to even get enough of a level where these contaminants suddenly step up from “negligible” to “trace amounts”? I bet you will likely die from a water overdose - yes you can get too much H2O into your system and die from that - as your body chemistry goes bonkers dealing with the amount of water it needs to process as you try to drink enough water to make these contaminants an issue. Or even more obvious, you would drown long before you have ingested enough of these chemicals to make a difference. Coming back to the farts, I guarantee you that you would have a bigger & better chance of some adverse effect if you rode the elevator once with someone farting in it than if you drank a lifetime of this contaminated and supposedly dangerous water.

There is a real simple reason why nobody mentions what would be considered the minimum medical dose, or even what would be concidered the treshhold for a risky dosage. But I bet the people that led with this idiotic story will have everyone panicking over this crap and their names mentioned everywhere for their civic duty. Now that would not be too bad because stupid people deserve to be made fun of, but I am certain some politician will suddenly see a chance to score some cheap points, and we will all be made to pay with some legal idiocy that does absolutely nothing but cost the tax payer a fortune while expanding the death grip of big government. Talk about a bad smell…