Showing posts with label pharmaceuticals in water supply. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pharmaceuticals in water supply. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Sunday, November 28, 2010
10 Reasons Our Shallow Fresh Water Supply is in Deep Trouble
Activist Post
Fresh clean water is essential to all life forms. It seems that a resource so vital should not be corralled, controlled, or corrupted by any corporation or government. However, with fresh water supplies under assault on multiple fronts, governments seek to further clamp down on individual human usage, while doing very little to reduce the reasons for the contamination. At the same time, corporations that repackage water and sell it back to the public enjoy financial benefits from the scarcity of their "product."
Upon review, water scarcity is an alarming prospect indeed; especially in areas of the world where clean water was limited to begin with. The extended droughts caused by climate shifts, cumulative aspects of general human pollution, dirty industrial and agricultural practices, and blatant chemical contamination significantly reduce the supply of clean water. The more precious this resource becomes, the more our friendly multinational corporations profit from this new "commodity," and the more our governments seek to tax it.
Here are 10 reasons why our water supply is in deep trouble:
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| Dangerously Dry Lake Mead |
2. Industrial Agriculture pollution: Industrial agriculture is one of the leading causes of water pollution in the United States today. The EPA estimates that 48% of river and stream pollution, and 41% of lake pollution, is due to industrial agriculture. The most common pollutants from agriculture include animal waste (raw manure is up to 160 times more toxic than raw municipal sewage), pesticides, fertilizers, and animal antibiotics. Water pollution from industrial farms not only damages the environment and kills wildlife, but it can also sicken and kill people.
3. Oil disasters and dispersants: The Gulf Oil Spill leaked over 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf waters -- and many reports indicate it is still gushing. The BP "clean-up" teams have sprayed up to 36,000 gallons of chemical dispersant in a single day into the Gulf, which is believed to be far more toxic than the oil itself. Although Gulf waters are clearly not used for fresh water, there is evidence that this environmental disaster has already contaminated drinking water and crops along the Gulf Coast and beyond. There was also one of the largest oil spills in Midwest history this past July that went largely unreported nationally -- where an estimated 1 million gallons of oil has leaked into major fresh water sources.
4. Commercial bottlers: Large multinational beverage companies are usually given water-well privileges (and even tax breaks) over citizens because they create jobs, which is apparently more important to the local governments than water rights to other taxpaying citizens. These companies such as Coca Cola and Nestlé (which bottles suburban Michigan well-water and calls it Poland Spring) suck up millions of gallons of water, leaving the public to suffer with any shortages.
5. Fracture drilling for natural gas: Congress exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act after it was considered safe since a 2004 study (PDF) by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. The evidence is now overwhelming that it does indeed contaminate the groundwater to where some residents can even light their tap water on fire. The new documentary Gasland does a great job educating the public about this method and its effects on the water supply.
6. Pharmaceuticals: It has been well-reported that measurable levels of pharmaceuticals like antidepressants, pain killers, antibiotics, and sex hormones have entered the public water supply due to our pill-pushing "health" system. Studies have shown that these pharmaceuticals are causing bizarre mutations to wildlife. We can only assume these drugs have similar effects on humans, thus making most public water systems unfit to drink for this reason alone.
7. Industrial/mining waste: Industrial and mining waste are also major pollutants in our waterways. These wastes typically include dangerous heavy metals, the most recognizable being Mercury. A 2009 study found dangerous levels of Methylmercury in all of the 291 U.S. freshwater streams tested in the report. Most of the Mercury contamination in the U.S. is blamed on industrial air pollution that falls back to the surface with rainfall.
9. Shifting Climate: It cannot be disputed that the overall climate patterns are shifting and changing. While the experts debate whether the cause of this climate shift is from global warming from C02, the sun, La Niña, or Earth's poles shifting, the fact remains that record extreme weather is happening all over the globe. Since there is always the same amount of H2O on the planet at all times, some areas have had record droughts, while others have had record flooding. Areas like the Southwest U.S. are experiencing an 11-year drought, while the Midwest has beenravaged by record floods. The effect of droughts on the water supply are obvious, but flooding too can massively contaminate the public water supply as was seen in the aftermath of Katrina.
10. Gluttonous Usage: People in First World countries who enjoy modern water treatment and delivery systems tend to use astronomically more water than their developing-world counterparts. Americans lead all global citizens in water usage at about 580 liters-per-day, followed by Australians at just under 500 liters-per-day. Although a fully-developed nation, the British only use around 150 liters-per-day, followed by India coming in at around 120 lpd. Clearly there are ways to live modern healthy lives while respecting the value of fresh water through conservation methods and practices.
As our public drinking water becomes more limited because of contamination, the purification process applies more chemicals -- which further compromises the quality of water. Incidentally, most public water companies still put sodium fluoride in the water despite that it is proven to be a neurotoxin. In fact, a town in California is being fined by the state health department for NOT fluoridating the water.
Water, which is our very foundation of health, seems to be under assault from all sides. This cannot be allowed to continue. We need to become involved at the local level, have our water independently tested, then research the various ways we can filter the water ourselves if our local governments will not support our right to drink water free of contaminants and toxic additives.
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Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex: A Deadly Fairy Tale
Global Research
It has been a particularly bad month for the pharmaceutical industrial complex in its ongoing litigations in American courts. Among the main pharmaceutical headlines, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine for HPV, now being widely administered to pre-teens, was found to be linked to amyltrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease; following a $1.4 billion fine in promoting one of its blockbuster drugs Zyprexa off-label, deceptive correspondence was uncovered by Eli Lilly gaming the system again by promoting another one of its drugs, Cymbalta, off-label for fibromyalgia; AstraZeneca was fined $160 million for scamming the Medicaid system in Kentucky after being fined $215 million for ripping off Alabama; Glaxo lost a Pennsylvania trial for failing to warn doctors and pregnant women of the dangers of its antidepressant drug Paxil related to birth defects; and Pfizer scored a record-breaking fine of $2.3 billion for illegally marketing several drugs over the years: Bextra, Zyvox, Geodon and Lyrica. These kinds of charges, among the many others, have become a habit for drug makers for the past dozen years.
When we speak of the pharmaceutical industry complex, it does not refer solely to private drug manufacturers. The complex, like a Matrix that holds captive the health of the nation in medical slavery by its own design and manipulation, is a consortium, a spiders’ web woven with financial attachments throughout the medical profession. In addition to the pharmaceutical and medical device firms, this complex includes every government health agency—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and or course the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—as well as drug lobbying firms now employing a large number of former Congresspersons, insurance and HMO companies, all of the leading professional medical associations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the majority of medical schools and their research departments who are heavily funded by drug money, many of the most prestigious medical journals, and ultimately all of this filtering downward to the physicians who diagnose our illnesses and prescribe our medications and treatments.
America is rightly regarded as having led much of the world in many qualitative innovations in all fields. That reputation is duly deserved. However, there is a new dynamic at work that is causing this reputation to be challenged. We are a nation that prides itself in our humanity, our sense of fairness, but today there is a growing concern that we are now being monikered as a country held hostage to a national security complex, which includes the largest military complex in the world, an obscenely expensive healthcare system and self-serving bureaucracies and private industries that serve their own financial ends. So it is not surprising that after spending this year $2.6 trillion on healthcare, we have such little health to show for it. There are second world countries where people live longer and healthier lives. And we have the worst healthcare among developed nations. So what have we received for our $2.6 trillion.
As the current healthcare debate continues to rage over in sundries—the $200 billion net profit health insurance industry—the entire deliberation over disease prevention and treatment has been overshadowed. And amidst this partisan and ideological anarchy, perpetuated by our elected officials, the media, and fueled by the pharmaceutical complex, two other areas America excels as a leader above all other developed nations is in being the premier breeding ground for the pharmaceutical industrial complex’s greatest profits and, second, as the world’s exemplar in medical fraud and corruption. The fairy tale of America’s health as being best served by drugs is a creation of this complex, a lullaby that brings ill citizens repeatedly to their doctors and hospitals for diagnosis and treatment, or simply to deny healthcare altogether to the uninsured.
The country is pacified by a blind belief that the drugs being prescribed to them have been proven safe because our government health agencies have our physical health and well-being in their best intentions. This is a lie, an extraordinarily deadly lie. Iatrogenesis, medically induced injury and death, is the number one cause of death in American medicine annually, since only a small percentage of these deaths are actually reported. Each year more Americans die from preventable deaths due to our medical system than all military causalities in the two world wars combined. This is tantamount to medical genocide. One of the major causes of these deaths is the overmedication of Americans in all ages. The constant need for profits has created an environment that allows the pharmaceutical industrial complex to use their enormous financial and political clout to literally make normal life experiences into new diseases, such as social anxiety disorder, in order to sell its drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has been given the authority to pathologize life, with the drugging of our children, seniors, etc. For example, the leading cause of AIDS deaths today is a result of liver failure. This is not a condition of HIV infection, but a direct result of the anti-HIV drug AZT. Is it little wonder then that we are being intimidated and frightened into believing that mandatory vaccination is being touted even though the science of efficacy and safety, even the need, for these new swine flu vaccines is patently unproven. It is perhaps one of the largest falsehoods ever perpetuated on humanity that dwarfs the sleaze on Wall Street.
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