Water Contamination and It's Effect On Our Health

"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth," Albert Schweitzer

The causes of water contamination are numerous and range from agricultural run off to improper use of household chemicals and everything in between. While the standard use in our society of over 75,000 different chemical compounds has offered added convenience and productivity in our lives, it has also come at a tremendous price... drastic increase in degenerative diseases. In the early 1900s, before chlorine, pesticides, herbicides and the tens of thousands of other chemicals that we are exposed to, the average person had a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer, today 1 in 3 can expect to get cancer in their lifetime.

One of the leading authorities on water contamination, Dr. David Ozonoff of the Boston University Of Public Health warns that, "the risk of disease associated with public drinking water has passed from the theoretical to the real," Many illnesses that in the past could not be linked to a probable cause, can now be directly linked to toxins in our drinking water.

The use of pesticides and herbicides has become so excessive that they are now commonly found in household tap water with alarming frequency.

The tragic health effects of consuming these highly toxic chemicals are magnified many times over for small children because their systems are more sensitive and still developing. Small children also consume a much larger volume of fluids per pound of body weight and therefore get a bigger dose, yet none of these factors are considered when the EPA's maximum contaminant levels are set. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report in 1993 on this subject and stated that " children are not little adults, their bodies are less developed and incapable of detoxifying certain harmful compounds."

Cancer extracts a staggering toll from our society. One in every seven people will die from this man made disease. According to the Center For Disease Control "Death from cancer is increasing more rapidly than is the population" It is now widely accepted that cancer is an environmental disease. The World Health Organization and the National Cancer Institute both suggest that most human  cancers, perhaps  as  many  as  90%   are  caused  by  chemical  carcinogens  in  the Environment.  This realisation is paramount for change because it means that most cancers could be prevented by minimising or eliminating our exposure to chemical carcinogens.

We spend billions of dollars each year seeking a cure for cancer. The disease is merely a result of the real problem, environmental pollution. If we were to direct these billions of dollars and the same intense effort towards curing the problem (pollution) instead of learning to live with the result (cancer) we would do future generations a great service, and we could realistically stop the "cancer epidemic."