Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [47]
When I get off the phone with Pecarich, I draw a mental map that leads from cow to consumer, from toilet to tap. Grain-fed cows grow 0157:H7 in their gut (most bacteria are killed by the acid of a cow’s stomach juice, but the 0157:H7 strain is resistant to strong acids; its incidence falls dramatically when cows are placed on their natural diet of hay and forage). The pathogen works its way from slaughterhouses into hamburgers (in 1993, more than seven hundred people became ill, and four children died, from eating contaminated meat at Jack in the Box restaurants; in 2007, the Topps Meat Company recalled 21.7 million pounds of ground beef after its hamburger, tainted with 0157:H7, sickened forty people in eight states). Sick people use their toilets, and the bacteria enter wastewater treatment plants. From there, the treated water goes into irrigation pipes and out onto the leafy greens. Or up the intake pipes of city drinking-water systems.
So there is shit in the water; I’d have to make peace with that (though not, perhaps, with grain-fed cows). I’m not in a high-risk group, the bacteria are few and far between, and they are dead (except, perhaps, for the 0157: H7). But what about the other contaminants that regularly show up in tap water, things like heavy metals?
Arsenic is a known human carcinogen. The EPA’s drinking-water goal for the metal is zero, but goals, in the bureaucracy of drinking water, are aspirational. They can’t be enforced. Today, the maximum contaminant level for arsenic is ten parts per billion, and more than fifty-six million Americans drink water that exceeds this level. Arsenic gets into water from naturally occurring deposits in rocks and soil (remember, water is a universal solvent: it picks up traces of substances—such as metals or minerals—wherever it roams). It’s also released to the environment through industry and agriculture (arsenic is a component of poultry feed). The element is used as a wood preservative, and in paints, dyes, metals, drugs, soaps, and semiconductors—all things routinely buried in landfills, which generate arsenictainted leachate. Arsenic is also an ingredient in some fertilizers, fungicides, insecticides, and rodenticides, which readily contaminate groundwater.
Arsenic in water doesn’t smell or taste like anything, so you’ll know it’s in there only if you test for it. Or await the consequences: high levels have been associated with thickening and discoloration of the skin, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea in the short term; and numbness in hands and feet, partial paralysis, and blindness over the longer term. Arsenic has been linked to cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver, and prostate. And it has an exalted place in the literature of intentional poisoning: it takes less than two ounces to kill a 150-pound person. A twelve-foot-long two-by-six that’s pressure treated with arsenic contains enough poison to kill two hundred adults if you burn the board and feed its ash to the crowd.
How do you tell if you’ve been exposed to a dangerous dose of arsenic? It’s relatively simple: you clip a sample of your hair or finger-or toenail, and send it to a lab. But then what? The test can’t tell you whether you’ll get cancer, and there’s no treatment for exposure, only relief from symptoms of illness.
In January of 2006, the EPA lowered its arsenic standard from fifty parts per billion to ten (about the equivalent of ten drops of ink in an Olympic-size swimming pool, or