The human body is nothing but chemicals
Here's the good news. You can uncap a bottle of any of the brands of packaged drinking water and drink to your heart's content. Nothing will happen to you. You will not feel nausea, or get the urge to vomit. You will not feel dizzy and your skin will not break out in a rash. You will definitely not die. These symptoms occur only if one is acutely exposed to toxic chemicals such as pesticides. They are the short-term effects of being contaminated in gross amounts, in high concentrations. No, when you drink your bottle of bottled water you will merely feel refreshed, as one is wont to when one drinks water.
That's because the concentration levels of pesticide residues the pml test has found in these bottles are low. Too low to cause acute, or immediate, effects. But their undoubted presence, in however tiny an amount - and this is the really bad news - immediately puts you at risk.You are put in the dangerous situation of being affected in the long term. For pesticides are also known to possess chronic health effects, effects that occur long after repeated exposure to miniscule amounts of these toxic chemicals. Say, for how long have you been drinking bottled water?
Slow, almost invisible, contamination leads to cancer, liver and kidney damage, disorders of the nervous system, damage to the immune system and birth defects. Such are the dangers that pesticide residues in marketed bottled water are opening the trusting consumer up to. This is called low dose chronic exposure. Pesticides persist in the environment and slowly, through the food and water, enter human bodies and accumulate in body fat. Adding to the knowledge on the carcinogenic effects of pesticides are recent scientific studies, from within a field of study called immunotoxicology, that point to the impact on the immune system. It is now evident that pesticides in human bodies have an immunosuppressive effect - reduced immunity obviously exacerbates diseases like cancer or asthma.
Organochlorine pesticides have a slow decomposition rate. They are persistent in the environment and accumulate in the upper tro-phic levels of the food chain. They like the human body, in short.
Take lindane (g-hch), found in 32 of the 34 samples the pml tested. All hch isomers are stored in fat tissue; lindane tends to get stored at much larger rates. While the other isomers are more readily metabolised and so eliminated, lindane is quite defiant and tends to hang about longer. Lindane affects the central nervous system, liver, kidney, pancreas, testes and the nasal mucous membrane. Rats exposed to g-hch (humans are supposed to be 10 times more susceptible than animals) have shown evidence of liver cancer. Not surprising; lindane is a potent carcinogen.
Then there's ddt (and its metabolites ddd and dde), found in 24 of the 34 samples tested (and 1 and 9, respectively). Lifetime treatment of mice with ddt induced liver tumours, as did the combined exposure to ddd and dde. ddt produces serious functional and morphological changes in every organ of the human body, but its most disturbing effect is how it warps the nervous system. Detoxification in both humans and animals involve converting ddt to less toxic acetate. But little is known about variations, from person to person, of in-built mechanisms that can detoxify ddt. Forget detoxification. Once ddt finds its way inside the human body, it stays there. ddt excretion is extremely slow even after intake ceases.
What about the organophosphorus pesticides? This group is less persistent than organochlorines in soil and food. But they are readily water-soluble. Usually, they break up into non-toxic substances via metabolism. But that doesn't mean they aren't harmful.
Take malathion, found in 29 out of 34 samples tested. It can be activated in the human liver, via enzymatic processes, to produce malaoxon. The latter (metabolised) chemical is a disaster for the central nervous system. It inhibits (blocks, slows down, ties up) the functioning of the enzyme cholinesterase, which is completely essential to the nervous system. Inhibited cholinesterase activity prevents neural signals from being transmitted from the brain to various parts of the body. Malathion is also known to be a mutagen; it is a chemical capable of tinkering with the body's chromosomal set-up. Experiments have proved that malathion can cause chromosomal aberrations in the bone marrow cells of rats.
Chlorpyrifos, the other organophosphorus abundantly found in the samples (28 out of 34), is a suspected neuroteratogen. Any chemical that acts during pregnancy to produce a physical or functional defect in the child developing in the womb is called a teratogen. By definition, therefore, chlorpyrifos is a chemical that attacks the neural development of the foetus. It inhibits dna synthesis.
Exactly what it is that the bottled water industry puts out as pure drinking water? Each bottle contains multiple residues; there could be traces of up to 5 pesticides in a single glass of bottled water. This raises the possibility of synergism, where the presence of one chemical boosts the power of another. What are bottled water consumers bombarding their bodies with, out of trust, purely unknowingly?