A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

A kind of odd article came across my timeline this morning, and it seems to fit here, so I'd like to point it out.

https://www.newsweek.com/drinking-water-warning-hempstead-new-york-1903989

Hempstead New York's Mayor is sounding the alarm about 1,4-dioxane in their water. He's also tying it to the EPA's new PFA requirements in asking for the federal government to buy them a new water treatment system. To be clear, I know of no reason that PFAs and dioxane would be tied together. PFAs are fluorinated, that's what the "F" tells you in PFA. Dioxane is C4H8O2. I know of no process, off hand, that uses both. They are both pollutants, but that's as far as they go in the same category.

What's really odd to me here is that the EPA has a thing called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR). Every few years they pick another set of chemicals and test water across the country for those chemicals.

UCMR 3 was from 2013-2015 and I distinctly remembered two things about it. One, dioxane was on the list. Two, New York had a very high incidence of dioxane being over acceptable limits. If New York wasn't top in the nation, it was at least pretty close.

So I looked up UCMR 3(https://www.epa.gov/dwucmr/occurrence-data-unregulated-contaminant-monitoring-rule#3), downloaded the data, searched it for Hempstead, and counted it up. Hempstead had 30 tests for dioxane over those two years and 25 of them tested high. Some of them ridiculously high.

Now I wonder. Did Hempstead ignore it for the last decade and now sees an opportunity to try to get the federal government to pay for their water treatment? Is that why they're mentioning it in the same breath as PFAs now? Or did they do something, and it wasn't enough?

The article just leads to more questions than answers, and the take home message here is that your water is almost certainly contaminated with tons of crap that people know about, and tons of crap that people don't know about. The only way to protect yourself is to clean it yourself.

Reverse osmosis is probably your best bet to get stuff that you know about and don't know about out of your water. While it's said to not be 100% effective for dioxane, if you had one, single point, method to use, that would still be it.

I know I've disparaged Trish Greenhalgh here previously for a couple of things, but, specifically refusing to say the word "mask" before, and instead using "face coverings" in places like her Oxford bio. So it's only fair that I post about her latest paper. I'd reply directly to where I said that before, but I can't search on this instance and I can't find it.

This is really good work, and specifically discusses different masks and respirators clearly.

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23

And here we go. Thanks to a couple of people for pointing this article out to me this morning.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2024/04/29/police-make-first-arrests-in-florida-of-pro-palestinian-protesters-at-two-university-campuses/

At least 8 people in Florida were charged with wearing a mask in public during these protests.

Having slept on this, and discussed over tea with my wife, we realized that with this latest health situation, we now can't think of a single person whom we interact with in real life that hasn't had a new onset health problem in the last 4 years. Not. One.

Small sample size, for sure, especially because we keep a small family and friend circle(we're both only children, for example). They range in age from my wife's friend, in just her 30's and now probably dealing with PEM, to my dad who is now in his upper 70's. We, literally, can't think of one person who we would describe as "fine" at this point.

I know it's not a statistically important sample size, but, if you really step back, imagine May of 2019, and think hard about it, who would have thought we'd be saying that 5 years later? And that everyone would say that it's normal and acceptable?

This week in 2019 we were preparing for a huge trip. We had Amtrak tickets and rental cars all lined up, and we visited 14 states, and spent some time in Washington DC, on a genealogical expedition throughout the whole summer. It was probably the best trip of our lives.

Mind blowing. That's all.

I'm going way back to my first real post on Mastodon here. I've mentioned my wife's best friend quite a few times over the last couple of years.

I had another post about her when she asked about COVID precautions, and then refused. She went to Japan a few months back, unmasked, of course.

So, she calls my wife tonight and starts with "I'm wearing a heart monitor."

Long story short, after listening to her whole story of doctors visits, she has PEM. Her doctors haven't quite gotten there yet.

My wife went ahead and said that was pretty common after COVID, and she said, "Oh come on. I've only had it four times. Some people have had it way more often than me."

She has no clue, despite our best attempts.