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Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

nytimes.com

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#81
post #6

This is really bad. Most bad things in life are reversible but this degree of health damage isn't. May everyone responsible for this be exemplarily punished to deter this kind of disregard for human life from happening again. > Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generation…

The curious thing is, it takes a lot of money to train military personnel. You’d think the military would hesitate to inflict an injury on itself such as this. If a terrorist organization did this then the USA would go to war.

Personnel doesn't last long, no more than ~10 years for infantry. So if the damage doesn't impede combat function over the expected useful lifetime of the person...

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't found that to be the case. https://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-WHER25-Reverse-Osmosis-Filt... that is $130 and the kits are very easy to install. In 13 months you'd have it paid off and you can make all the water you want.

They've definitely come down in price but you're still talking 130 + installation + $80 in filters per year + leak potential. It's almost break even. Unfortunately there's still the problem that my wife being from a 3rd world country won't drink anything out of the tap that hasn't been boiled no matter how much it's been filtered due to no rational reason.

Basic systems will waste 4 gallons of water for every gallon of purified water depending on input pressure and temperature. Lower input temperature and pressure will increase waste and lower output.

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#83

I wonder if there's a way to democratize inexpensive health testing and see these trends faster? Imagine a world where you're testing your blood/sweat/saliva/vitals daily and semi-anonymously sending the results to be analysed using statistical methods. A doctor can give you a one time use current diagnoses voucher to add into the system for serious diseases. The whole thing is voluntary. There's definitely some dyst…

[deleted]

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#84

I wonder if there's a way to democratize inexpensive health testing and see these trends faster? Imagine a world where you're testing your blood/sweat/saliva/vitals daily and semi-anonymously sending the results to be analysed using statistical methods. A doctor can give you a one time use current diagnoses voucher to add into the system for serious diseases. The whole thing is voluntary. There's definitely some dyst…

There's one general point that has to always be considered in these sort of ideas. Resources are not infinite. Of course you realize this, but I think we who come from the software world can fail to appreciate how severely restricting a problem this actually is. There are 325 million people in the US. Let's imagine a very high participation rate and just exclude infants and some outliers, just so see what would happen. So we'll call it 300 million.

That's 300 million tests per day or about 110 billion per year. The cost there is already going to be extreme. Even if you can get the tests down to $10/person, which you probably cannot, that's more than a trillion dollars a year -- upwards of 5% of the GDP. But the bigger issue here is what money represents: resources.

Machinery, maintenance, operation, even the strain on the transportation system would be intolerable. For instance think about the little kit you send over with your sample. I mean you'd think just getting it there would be negligible, but it'd be anything but. The USPS currently handles 20.2 million pieces of mail per hour. [1] Just handling these packages alone would increase the entire postal system's burden by more than 60%!

Or even consider the simple packaging that needs to be produced and disposed of. How small of a kit can we get to ensure sterility, sufficient sample size, and transportation safety? Let's say 100 grams. That doesn't seem like that much, but again think about it at scale. That's 30 million kilograms. For some sort of scale, The Statue of Liberty weighs about 200,000 kilograms. So each day you're talking about 150 Statues of Liberty of packaging and material that needs to be manufactured, distributed, delivered, processed, and disposed.

Big ideas in the physical world have quite tremendous barriers.

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As one interesting aside, imagine you took the market value for literally every single consumed good and service in the US, the sum total of money invested by businesses, and all government expenditure on top of it. And then you divided that equally among every man, woman, and child. How much would it be? It's interesting to compare expectation versus reality there. Conveniently what I described is really easy to measure - it's the GDP/capita. And it's less than $60,000. I always find that number quite bemusing when thinking about it contrasted against our economic ideals in various matters.

[1] - https://facts.usps.com/one-day/

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#85
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body?

The minerals you can get elsewhere, but it seems some people get surprised by the taste of demineralized water and dislike it.

Correct. I remember seeing a show about how Dasani (IIRC) drinking water is made. The person leading the show around said something along the lines that 'at this stage the water is so pure it does not taste good, so next we add minerals back in.'

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#86
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems your condition is very different from that of a newborn baby with an under developed and fragile immune system, who's mothers are fed mistruths about how harmful vaccines are. I don't see how your story relates in any way about harmful anti-vax groups (and vaccines in general) other than "I got some unrelated help at one point". So yes, we can absolutely be happy they are being demonitized. That being said I am…

Embracing the anti-vax movement because the standard healthcare system has failed this individual isn't something I considered before, but it makes a lot of sense. Our healthcare system is expensive, difficult to navigate, and the quality of care is wildly inconsistent. I'm by no means an anti-vaxer, but there have to be millions of Americans that are fed up with the state of healthcare and looking for an alternative…

> there have to be millions of Americans that are fed up with the state of healthcare and looking for an alternative.

The popularity of Chiropractic "doctors" is another symptom of the same problem.

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#87
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The curious thing is, it takes a lot of money to train military personnel. You’d think the military would hesitate to inflict an injury on itself such as this. If a terrorist organization did this then the USA would go to war.

Personnel doesn't last long, no more than ~10 years for infantry. So if the damage doesn't impede combat function over the expected useful lifetime of the person...

+1, I actually had a Lt. Col. use the same math on me when one of my Marines was worried about chemical exposure.

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#88
post #20
post #6

This is really bad. Most bad things in life are reversible but this degree of health damage isn't. May everyone responsible for this be exemplarily punished to deter this kind of disregard for human life from happening again. > Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generation…

One of my favorite things about NYC are the quarterly water resevoir updates. They test constantly (more than bottled water is required to) and release detailed reports about the state of things [0] Not only that but they'll send you water bottles to fill up and then test your water for lead and give you results which is neat too. The United States as a whole has done some incredible things in regards to air quality,…

How do you know that this testing isn't anything other than a facade?

Where I live, they do the same thing. You get a water quality report in the mail a couple of times a year. However the level of the one thing that's most likely to be a problem here (PCBs) is not included.

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#89
post #68
post #40

Blood testing has emerged as a sticking point. Specifically, a growing movement of veterans and others, united in advocacy groups with names like Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition and Need Our Water, are asking the military test their blood for the chemicals, hoping to bring results to their doctors or use them in lawsuits. Strange that the article is being so cagey about why this might be the case. Every human b…

That's a nice explanation. But what I don't get is: if the chemical is highly inert that means it doesn't react easily with other substances, so how then can it be carcinogenic?

It doesn't react chemically but is useful for its physical properties, which means it does influence the environment it's in in that manner. I wouldn't rule it out as carcinogenic because it's mostly chemically inert because of the same reasoning, namely that there are other ways it may change the environment than chemically.

Re: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

#90
post #6

This is really bad. Most bad things in life are reversible but this degree of health damage isn't. May everyone responsible for this be exemplarily punished to deter this kind of disregard for human life from happening again. > Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generation…

They will not be punished. They never are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_... The "problems" kill people. From the governments perspective this soft, civilian side, collateral damage is a required cost of our military machine. Inside of…

This isn't just the military. Corporations rarely are held 100% accountable for the damage they do. The only person who cares about individuals are individuals.
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