Contaminated Water Quotes

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إن القذارة الحقيقية تقبع في الداخل، أما القذارة الأخرى فهي تزول بغسلها. ويوجد نوع واحد من القذارة لا يمكن تطهيرها بالماء النقي، وهو لوثة الكراهية والتعصب التي تلوث الروح. نستطيع أن نطهر أجسامنا بالزهد والصيام، لكن الحب وحده هو الذي يطهر قلوبنا. Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
Elif Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love)
What people look like, or, rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flash card to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to hold, whether they belong in this section of town or that seat in a boardroom, whether they should be expected to speak with authority on this or that subject, whether they will be administered pain relief in a hospital, whether their neighborhood is likely to adjoin a toxic waste site or to have contaminated water flowing from their taps, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by authorities with impunity.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
Elif Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love)
Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind - completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul.
Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes)
I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
For human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life—these are sins.” For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.
Nathaniel Rich (Losing Earth: A Recent History)
work on a subterranean wall of clay—five kilometers long, up to a meter thick, and thirty meters deep—intended to trap contaminated water before it could reach the river.
Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
Bottled water comes in plastic, usually made from virgin plastic (non-recycled), which is made from oil and has to be transported (with a high carbon footprint). It sits on a shelf until you buy it, where it may leach chemicals – such as BPA and dioxins as well as microplastics – into the water. And while it has to pass safety standards, it is only tested when it is bottled. Recent studies also showed that 93% of bottled water showed signs of microplastic contamination.
Martin Dorey (No. More. Plastic.: What you can do to make a difference)
Beloved, to be black in America is to live in terror. That terror is fast. It is glimpsed in cops giving chase to black men and shooting them in their backs without cause. Or the terror is slow. It chips like lead paint on a tenement wall, or flows like contaminated water through corroded pipes that poison black bodies. It is slow like genocide inside prison walls where folk who should not be there perish.
Michael Eric Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America)
Thomas Jefferson thought that the United States ought to have a revolution every generation so that democracy could periodically purge itself of contaminants. He meant political revolutions; we have watered down his advice and created a succession of “lifestyle” revolutions instead. Just at the point when a radical innovation or movement might begin to elicit significant discussion within our social order, it makes the cover of Time and receives testimonials from one or two Hollywood stars. Thus elevated into harmlessness, it is soon discarded, leaving little more than a vague, residual stain on our cultural fashions.
Frederick Salomon Perls (Gestalt Therapy Verbatim)
All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity is released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world--bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.
Akwaeke Emezi (Freshwater)
A study we came across revealed that p80 is very efficient at removing mercury from contaminated water[245]. This sounds good right? Read on… If p80 is attracting mercury, we can only assume it is likely some of the mercury is being escorted to the brain. So, if we receive traces of mercury in the vaccines or are exposed to mercury from other sources, and receive a p80 containing vaccine, then a mercury-free vaccine could still potentially cause mercury accumulation in the brain.
James Morcan (Vaccine Science Revisited: Are Childhood Immunizations As Safe As Claimed? (The Underground Knowledge Series, #8))
When you fill a clogged drain with more water than it can hold, it’s bound to overflow and contaminate everything around it. When grief overwhelms someone, when they are enraged at what fate has done to them, their fury often overflows and is inflicted upon the world.
Amish Tripathi (Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta (Ram Chandra #3))
Tears comes to my eyes when I think about some of God's people I have had the privilege to meet in the past few years. These are people with families, with dreams, people who are made in God's image as much as you and I are. And these people are suffering. Many of them are sick, some even dying, as they live out their lives in dwellings that we would not consider good enough for our household pets. I am not exaggerating. Much of their daily hardship and suffering could be relieved with access to food, clean water, clothing, adequate shelter, or basic medical attention. I believe that God wants His people, His church, to meet these needs. The Scriptures are filled with commands and references about caring for the poor and for those who cannot help themselves. The crazy part about God's heart is that He doesn't just ask us to give; He desires that we love those in need as much as we love ourselves. That is the core of the second greatest command, to 'love your neighbor as yourself' (Matthew 22:39). He is asking that you love as you would want to be loved if it were your child who was blind from drinking contaminated water; to love the way you would want to be loved if you were the homeless woman sitting outside the cafe; to love as though it were your family living in the shack slapped together from cardboard and scrap metal...
Francis Chan (Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God)
Murky Water, Dusty Mirror Murky water is turbid; let it settle and it clears. A dusty mirror is dim; clean it and it is bright. What I realize as I observe this is the Tao of clarifying the mind and perceiving its essence. The reason why people's minds are not clear and their natures are not stable is that they are full of craving and emotion. Add to this eons of mental habit, acquired influences deluding the mind, their outgrowths clogging up the opening of awareness - this is like water being murky, like a mirror being dusty. The original true mind and true essence are totally lost. The feelings and senses are unruly, subject to all kinds of influences, taking in all sorts of things, defiling the mind. If one can suddenly realize this and change directions, wash away pollution and contamination, gradually remove a lifetime of biased mental habits, wandering thoughts and perverse actions, increasing in strength with persistence, refining away the dross until there is nothing more to be refined away, when the slag is gone the gold is pure. The original mind and fundamental essence will spontaneously appear in full, the light of wisdom will suddenly arise, and one will clearly see the universe as though it were in the palm of the hand, with no obstruction. This is like murky water returning to clarity when settled, like a dusty mirror being restored to brightness when polished. That which is fundamental is as ever: without any lack.
Liu Yiming (Awakening to the Tao (Shambhala Classics))
Plastic now occurs in nature naturally.
Anthony T. Hincks
The greatest pollution problem is not found in the atmosphere, water, or soil; but in the minds of 90% of the population, which are contaminated with negative thoughts and beliefs.
Maddy Malhotra (How to Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident: Overcome Fears, Break Habits, Be Successful and Happy)
known as the five ‘hindrances’ (nīvaraṇa): sensual desire, ill-will, tiredness and sleepiness, excitement and depression, and doubt. An ancient simile compares the mind that is continually prey to the five hindrances to a bowl of water disturbed or contaminated in five ways: mixed with red dye, steaming hot, full of moss and leaves, ruffled by the wind, muddied and in a dark place.
Rupert Gethin (The Foundations of Buddhism (OPUS))
A different day. – Even if the experiment of Biblical times supported the argument that it is the abuse of light wines and beer, not their use, which is reprehensible, we must remember that we are dealing with a modern problem. In the time of Jesus in Palestine filth that is now disposed of through modern sewerage systems was tossed from the windows into the street. Shallow wells spread disease, and water was considered positively dangerous, as it to-day in some countries where similar social conditions exist. It may be that to run the risk of typhoid by drinking water contaminated by filth; but to-day in America pure water may be had in abundance.(1926)
Deets Pickett
Trespassing laws bother me. The idea that I can't trespass on private land but private landowners can trespass into my space, by dirtying my air and contaminating my water, has always left me doubting the validity of such restrictions.
Sara Dykman (Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration)
In our culture, the water temperature increases daily. Without realizing it, we slowly become acclimated to a toxic environment full of poisonous influences. As the water temperature rises, we keep pretending we’re soaking in a hot tub having the time of our lives, never dreaming that we’re scalding our souls. As we become scarred and desensitized to what is right and wrong, good and evil, life-giving and life-draining, we lose sight of our first love. We move away from God one degree at a time.
Craig Groeschel (Soul Detox: Clean Living in a Contaminated World)
A drop of a harmful contamination in a teaspoon of water makes the water bad, Just as a drop of a harmful sentiment in a small amount of belief can damage the belief. Make your belief as big as an ocean and it cannot be tainted by the drops. The ocean is not pure. The quote is not to say it is, but it is a place of life and which the balance of a healthy planet must rely on. Life isn't about perfection - ie not eradicating moments - but a peace that goes beyond understanding with and within ALL moments.
Gillian Johns (The Lives and Karma of Jeremiah Blum and how he met his match.)
But I need to remember that the grief is the settlers’ as well. They too will never walk in a tallgrass prairie where sunflowers dance with goldfinches. Their children have also lost the chance to sing at the Maple Dance. They can’t drink the water either.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
If all this is correct, baptism does not confer on us a status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!
Rowan Williams (Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer)
Food has become a cause of disease rather than a guardian of health in the modern world. Once regarded as the central pillar of life and the most effective of all medicines, food is now a major contributing factor in cancer, heart disease, arthritis , mental illness, and many other pathological conditions. Virtually monopolized by agricultural and industrial cartels, public food supplies, are processed and packaged to produce profits and prolong shelf life, not to promote health and prolong human life. It seems incredible that public health authorities permit the unrestricted use of hydrogenated vegetable oils, refined sugar, chemical preservatives, toxic pesticides, and over 5,000 other artificial food additives that have repeatedly been proven to cause cancer, impair immunity, and otherwise erode human health, while restricting the medical use of nutrients, herbs, acupuncture, fasting, and other traditional therapies that have been shown to prevent and cure the very diseases caused by chemical contaminants in food and water.
Daniel Reid (The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing: Guarding the Three Treasures)
[According to 1348 theorists, poisoning of Christian water by Jews was the cause of Black Death.] Even the poison used to contaminate the Christian water supply was described in meticulous detail. It was "about the size of an egg," except when it was the "size of a nut" or a "large nut," "a fist" or "two fists"- and it came packaged in "a leather pouch," except when it was packaged in "linen cloth," "a rag," or a "paper coronet"; and the poison was variously made from lizards, frogs, and spiders- when it was not made from the hearts of Christians and from Holy Communion wafers.
John Kelly (The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time)
My soul is no different from a Lotus flower. I didn’t start my journey in fresh water because my environment was not pleasant. Just like a Lotus flower, my life was surrounded by insects, debris, and so many unpleasant things and people. However, just like the Lotus petals are never contaminated by the murky water, my core remained pure. Just like the Lotus flower, I came from a place of suffering. However, I remained true to myself. I have overcome many obstacles in my life. I am proud of myself—because this time, I jumped a little higher over the hurdles. I have finished the never-ending race. I have officially crossed the finish line and have a fresh start! I am renewed, and I am loved!
Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
And was it true, he asked, the stories of cities contaminated by the water supply, children killed by police with impunity, communities left to fend for themselves against natural disasters as bad as the earthquakes and mudslides this land endured? How could people still think of bring-land as some promised land knowing those things happened there?
Patricia Engel (Infinite Country)
What they had not considered was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
If [Hurricane] Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP [Deepwater Horizon] disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP has spent weeks failing to plug the hole in the earth that it made. Our political leaders cannot order fish species to survive, or bottlenose dolphins not to die in droves. No amount of compensation money can replace a culture that has lots its roots. And while politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water, and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
Naomi Klein (On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal)
The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level.
John McMurtry (The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 2nd Edition: From Crisis to Cure)
By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried. None may touch the dead or enter the Towers where they repose except certain men who are officially appointed for that purpose. They receive high pay, but theirs is a dismal life, for
Mark Twain (Following the Equator)
The fairly recent discovery that all of the water supplies in the industrialized countries are contaminated with minute amounts of antibiotics (from their excretion into water supplies) means that bacteria everywhere are experiencing low doses of antibiotics all the time. This exposure is exponentially driving resistance learning; the more antibiotics that go into the water, the faster the bacteria learn.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria)
The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons. For one, bacterial life cycles are incredibly fast: a single bacterium can produce a million offspring in a matter of hours. Each new generation opens up new possibilities for genetic innovation, either by new combinations of existing genes or by random mutations. Human genetic change is several orders of magnitude slower; we have to go through a whole fifteen-year process of maturation before we can even think about passing our genes to a new generation.
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza’s isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.26 Some neighborhoods, such as Shuja‘iyya and parts of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction. The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
Recovered fracking waste is left in open-air pits to evaporate. This releases volatile organic compounds, creating contaminated air, acid rain, and ground-level ozone. Metal ball bearings are added to fracking fluids to keep the fractures open indefinitely. These toxic chemicals leach out and contaminate nearby groundwater. Drinking-water wells near fracturing sites have been found to contain concentrations of methane seventeen times higher than normal.
Jim Marrs (Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us)
I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Stir fry!” Rhys proclaimed. “Really?” Finn leaned over his shoulder and peered down at the ingredients in the pan. Rhys moved to the side a little so Finn could reach in and grab something out of it. He sniffed it, then popped it into his mouth. “Well, it’s not terrible.” “Stop my beating heart!” Rhys put his hand over his heart and feigned astonishment. “Has my food passed the test of the hardest food critic in the land?” “No. I just said it wasn’t terrible.” Finn shook his head at Rhys’s dramatics and went to the fridge to get a bottle of water. “And I’m certain that Elora is a much harsher food critic than I’ll ever be.” “That’s probably true, but she’s never let me cook for her,” Rhys admitted, shaking the wok to stir up the vegetables more. “You really shouldn’t let him cook for you,” Finn advised, looking at me for the first time. “He gave me food poisoning once.” “You cannot get food poisoning from an orange!” Rhys protested and looked back at him. “It’s just not possible! And even if you can, I handed you the orange. I didn’t even have a chance to contaminate it!” “I don’t know.” Finn shrugged. A smile was creeping up, and I could tell he was amused by how much Rhys was getting worked up. “You didn’t even eat the part I touched! You peeled it and threw the skin away!” Rhys sounded exasperated. He wasn’t paying attention to the wok as he struggled to convince us of his innocence, and a flame licked up from the food. “Food’s on fire,” Finn nodded to the stove. “Dammit!
Amanda Hocking (Switched (Trylle, #1))
If that happened, everything could collapse into the large pressure suppression pool (a water reservoir for the emergency cooling pumps, which doubles as a pressure suppression system, capable of condensing steam in case of a broken steam pipe) below. This, in turn, could trigger a steam explosion that, some Soviet physicists calculated, could vaporise the fuel in the three other reactors, flatten 200 square kilometers, contaminate a water supply used by 30 million people, and render northern Ukraine and southern Belarus uninhabitable.194
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Ananda, an attendant of the Buddha, passed by a well near a village. A young low-caste woman, Pakati, was fetching water. He asked her for a drink. Pakati said: “I am low caste and therefore may not give you water. Please ask nothing from me in case I contaminate your holy state with my low-caste status.” Ananda said, “I am not interested in caste. It is water I am after.” Pakati’s heart leaped joyfully. She gave him water to drink, and when he left she followed him at a discrete distance. Finding out that he was a disciple of the Buddha, she went to the Buddha and said, “Please accept me and let me live in this place where your disciple Ananda dwells, so that I may see him and supply him with what he needs. For I find that I love Ananda.” The Buddha understood what was going on in her feelings and he said gently, “Pakati, your heart if full of love but you don’t understand your own emotions. It is not Ananda that you love, but his kindness. Accept the kindness that he has shown to you and in your turn practice it toward other. You have been born low caste, but in time you will outshine the glory of kings and queens.
Anne Bancroft (The Buddha Speaks - A book of guidance from Buddhist scriptures)
If the cultural standing of excrement doesn't convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates that can make plants grow and also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them that I don't like to call it "waste," when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when in a dried powdered form known as poudrette it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the eighteenth-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool (London's Wellcome Library holds a 150-year0old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him if he'd like a fork). They were also fond of prescribing it: excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily and wrote that he couldn't understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies.
Rose George (The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters)
But far from being a harmless source of fertilizer, dog feces is both an environmental contaminant (and is classified as such by the Environmental Protection Agency) and a source of pathogens that can infect people. Like human excreta, dog poo teems with pathogenic microbes, such as strains of E. coli, roundworms, and other parasites. One of the most common parasitic infections in Americans is the result of their exposure to dog feces. The dog roundworm Toxocara canis is common in dogs and, because of the ubiquity of dog feces, widespread in the environment. It can contaminate soil and water for years.
Sonia Shah (Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond)
However hyped the risk of germs may be, it is at least real. Some corporations go so far as to conjure threats where there are none. A television ad for Brita, the German manufacturer of water-filtration systems, starts with a close-up of a glass of water on a kitchen table. The sound of a flushing toilet is heard. A woman opens a door, enters the kitchen, sits at the table and drinks the water. The water in your toilet and the water in your faucet "come from the same source," the commercial concludes. Sharp-eyed viewers will also see a disclaimer a the start of the ad printed in tiny white letters: MUNICIPAL WATER IS TREATED FOR CONSUMPTION. This is effectively an admission that the shared origin of the water in the glass and the toilet is irrelevant and so the commercial makes no sense--at least not on a rational level. As a pitch aimed at Gut, however, it makes perfect sense. The danger of contaminated drinking water is as old as humanity, and the worst contaminant has always been feces. Our hardwired defense against contamination is disgust, an emotion that drives us to keep our distance from the contaminant. By linking the toilet and the drinking glass, the commercial connects feces to our home's drinking water and raises an ancient fear--a fear that can be eased with the purchase of one of the company's many fine products.
Daniel Gardner (The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger)
The scope was vast: Liquidators’ decontamination shifts ranged from a few minutes up to 10 hours a day, depending on exposure levels. First, they built one large and several small dams along river banks near the plant, to prevent rainfall from gathering up the radioactive dust and debris and washing it into the country’s most vital source of water.216 This gave them time to collect, remove and bury the same material that had been blown across the surrounding area. This included burying the Red Forest, which could not be burned because it would spread contaminated particles. Efforts to decontaminate the forest had failed because wind and rain would continually re-distribute radioactivity.217
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
When you feel like life is so overwhelming that you have no choice but to cry, simply stop in your tracks and bend over like you're catching your breath after a run. Then, let the tears fall straight down out of your eyes to the ground. Aim for perpendicularity. Your tears will avoid contaminating your cheeks, and you will not have to desperately swipe at your face, which is what leaves the irritation and telltale red marks. Consider enacting a few vomitous heaves. It may seem like extra drama, but people will assume you are merely hungover after some all-night rager you attended with your million friends, rather than standing alone in the street, sobbing into the sidewalk, watering the dried gum on the ground.
Jacqueline Novak (How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows)
I I I I I I t t t t t t i i i i i i s s s s s s u u u u u u n n n n n n f f f f f f o o o o o o r r r r r r t t t t t t u u u u u u n n n n n n a a a a a a t t t t t t e e e e e e t t t t t t h h h h h h a a a a a a t t t t t t t t t t t t h h h h h h e e e e e e l l l l l l i i i i i i g g g g g g h h h h h h t t t t t t t t t t t t h h h h h h a a a a a a t t t t t t m m m m m m a a a a a a n n n n n n y y y y y y o o o o o o f f f f f f u u u u u u s s s s s s h h h h h h a a a a a a v v v v v ve e e e e e i i i i i i i n n n n n n n J J J J J J Je e e e e e e s s s s s s s u u u u u u u s s s s s s s i i i i i i i s s s s s s s j j j j j j j u u u u u u u s s s s s s s t t t t t t t e e e e e e e n n n n n n n o o o o o o o u u u u u u u g g g g g g g h h h h h h h t t t t t t t o o o o o o o i i i i i i i l l l l l l l l l l l l l lu u u u u u u m m m m m m m i i i i i i i n n n n n n n a a a a a a a t t t t t t t e e e e e e e t t t t t t t h h h h h h h e e e e e e e c c c c c c c o o o o o o o r r r r r r r r r r r r r r u u u u u u u p p p p p p p t t t t t t t i i i i i i i o o o o o o o n n n n n n n i i i i i i i n n n n n n n our own lives, making ourselves look like hypocrites and making Jesus look like a peddler of contaminated water. Yet if we cleanse ourselves of our darkened deeds, or more accurately, if we allow Jesus to wash through us and within us, then we can become clean enough for the light that He offers to reflect in a positive way to the world around us.
Todd Coburn (Reflection of the Son)
There’s one major shortcoming inherent to using this method of cooling. Unlike in a typical PWR, the water entering the reactor is the same water that passes through the cooling pumps and then as steam through the turbines, meaning highly irradiated water is present in all areas of the system. A PWR uses a heat exchanger to pass heat from the reactor water to clean, lower pressure water, allowing the turbines to remain free of contamination. This is better for safety, maintenance and disposal. A second problem is that steam is allowed to form in the core, making dangerous steam voids more likely, and further increasing the chances of a positive void coefficient. In ordinary boiling water reactors, which use water as both a coolant and moderator like in a PWR, this would not be such a problem, but it is in a graphite-moderated BWR.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Thus every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types. Sex is no longer located in sex itself, but elsewhere - everywhere else, in fact. Politics is no longer restricted to the political sphere, but infects every sphere economics, science, art, sport ... Sport itself, meanwhile, is no longer located in sport as such, but instead in business, in sex, in politics, in the general style of performance. All these domains are affected by sport's criteria of 'excellence', effort and record-breaking, as by its childish notion of self-transcendence. Each category thus passes through a phase transition during which its essence is diluted in homeopathic doses, infinitesimal relative to the total solution, until it finally disappears, leaving a trace so small as to be indiscernible, like the 'memory of water' .
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building’s water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash. . . . The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.
William Gibson (Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1))
A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.
Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
Incredibly, it transpired afterwards that no proper, full fire drill had ever been conducted at the plant. Even the procedure for fighting fire at Chernobyl was almost identical to any other industrial fire, with no regard for the possibility of radiation exposure - so presumptuous were senior figures that nothing could ever go wrong.153 By 6:35am, when all but the blaze within the reactor core were extinguished, 37 fire crews, comprising 186 firemen in 81 engines, had arrived to battle the flames.154 A few brave firefighters even ventured inside Unit 4’s reactor hall itself and poured water straight into the reactor. The radioactivity was so intense that they received a lethal dose in under a minute. As with most other efforts to cool the reactor over the following days, this only made the situation worse. They were pumping water into a nuclear inferno so hot that most water either split into a dangerous hydrogen/oxygen mix or instantly evaporated, while any remaining water flooded the basement. Many firemen fell ill in the process, and were rushed to hospital in Pripyat, though it was not well prepared to deal with radiation sickness. Doctors and nurses were also irradiated because the patients they treated were so contaminated that their own bodies had become radioactive.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
I know we agree that civilization is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Theobald Smith, yet another of those forgotten heroes of medical history. Smith, born in 1859, was the son of German immigrants (the family name was Schmitt) in upstate New York and grew up speaking German, so was able to follow and appreciate the experiments of Robert Koch more quickly than most of his American contemporaries. He taught himself Koch’s methods for culturing bacteria and was thus able to isolate salmonella in 1885, long before any other American could do so. Daniel Salmon was head of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was primarily an administrator, but the convention of the day was to list the bureau head as lead author on the department’s papers, and that was the name that got attached to the microbe. Smith was also robbed of credit for the discovery of the infectious protozoa Babesia, which is wrongly named for a Romanian bacteriologist, Victor Babeş. In a long and distinguished career, Smith also did important work on yellow fever, diphtheria, African sleeping sickness, and fecal contamination of drinking water, and showed that tuberculosis in humans and in livestock was caused by different microorganisms, proving Koch wrong on two vital points. Koch also believed that TB could not jump from animals to humans, and Smith showed that that was wrong, too. It was thanks to this discovery that pasteurization of milk became a standard practice. Smith was, in short, the most important American bacteriologist during what was the golden age of bacteriology and yet is almost completely forgotten now.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
Quote from "The Dish Keepers of Honest House" ....TO TWIST THE COLD is easy when its only water you want. Tapping of the toothbrush echoes into Ella's mind like footsteps clacking a cobbled street on a bitter, dry, cold morning. Her mind pushes through sleep her body craves. It catches her head falling into a warm, soft pillow. "Go back to bed," she tells herself. "You're still asleep," Ella mumbles, pushes the blanket off, and sits up. The urgency to move persuades her to keep routines. Water from the faucet runs through paste foam like a miniature waterfall. Ella rubs sleep-deprieved eyes, then the bridge of her nose and glances into the sink. Ella's eyes astutely fixate for one, brief millisecond. Water becomes the burgundy of soldiers exiting the drain. Her mouth drops in shock. The flow turns green. It is like the bubbling fungus of flockless, fishless, stagnating ponds. Within the iridescent glimmer of her thinking -- like a brain losing blood flow, Ella's focus is the flickering flashing of gray, white dust, coal-black shadows and crows lifting from the ground. A half minute or two trails off before her mind returns to reality. Ella grasps a toothbrush between thumb and index finger. She rests the outer palm against the sink's edge, breathes in and then exhales. Tension in the brow subsides, and her chest and shoulders drop; she sighs. Ella stares at pasty foam. It exits the drain as if in a race to clear the sink of negativity -- of all germs, slimy spit, the burgundy of imagined soldiers and oppressive plaque. GRASPING THE SILKY STRAND between her fingers, Ella tucks, pulls and slides the floss gently through her teeth. Her breath is an inch or so of the mirror. Inspections leave her demeanor more alert. Clouding steam of the image tugs her conscience. She gazes into silver glass. Bits of hair loosen from the bun piled at her head's posterior. What transforms is what she imagines. The mirror becomes a window. The window possesses her Soul and Spirit. These two become concerned -- much like they did when dishonest housekeepers disrupted Ella's world in another story. Before her is a glorious bird -- shining-dark-as-coal, shimmering in hues of purple-black and black-greens. It is likened unto The Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem of 1845. Instead of interrupting a cold December night with tapping on a chamber door, it rests its claws in the decorative, carved handle of a backrest on a stiff dining chair. It projects an air of humor and concern. It moves its head to and fro while seeking a clearer understanding. Ella studies the bird. It is surrounded in lofty bends and stretches of leafless, acorn-less, nearly lifeless, oak trees. Like fingers and arms these branches reach below. [Perhaps they are reaching for us? Rest assured; if they had designs on us, I would be someplace else, writing about something more pleasant and less frightening. Of course, you would be asleep.] Balanced in the branches is a chair. It is from Ella's childhood home. The chair sways. Ella imagines modern-day pilgrims of a distant shore. Each step is as if Mother Nature will position them upright like dolls, blown from the stability of their plastic, flat, toe-less feet. These pilgrims take fate by the hand. LIFTING A TOWEL and patting her mouth and hands, Ella pulls the towel through the rack. She walks to the bedroom, sits and picks up the newspaper. Thumbing through pages that leave fingertips black, she reads headlines: "Former Dentist Guilty of Health Care Fraud." She flips the page, pinches the tip of her nose and brushes the edge of her chin -- smearing both with ink. In the middle fold directly affront her eyes is another headline: "Dentist Punished for Misconduct." She turns the page. There is yet another: "Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink and using contaminated dental instruments on patients." This world contains those who are simply insane! Every profession has those who stray from goals....
Helene Andorre Hinson Staley
White Man, to you my voice is like the unheard call in the wilderness. It is there, though you do not hear it. But, this once, take the time to listen to what I have to say. Your history is highlighted by your wars. Why is it all right for your nations to conquer each other in your attempts at domination? When you sailed to our lands, you came with your advanced weapons. You claimed you were a progressive, civilized people. And today, White Man, you have the ultimate weapons. Warfare which could destroy all men, all creation. And you allow such power to be in the hands of those few who have such little value in true wisdom. White Man, when you first came, most of our tribes began with peace and trust in dealing with you, strange white intruders. We showed you how to survive in our homelands. We were willing to share with you our vast wealth. Instead of repaying us with gratitude, you, White Man, turned on us, your friends. You turned on us with your advanced weapons and your cunning trickery. When we, the Indian people, realized your intentions, we rose to do battle, to defend our nations, our homes, our food, our lives. And for our efforts, we are labelled savages, and our battles are called massacres. And when our primitive weapons could not match those which you had perfected through centuries of wars, we realized that peace could not be won, unless our mass destruction took place. And so we turned to treaties. And this time, we ran into your cunning trickery. And we lost our lands, our freedom, and were confined to reservations. And we are held in contempt. 'As long as the Sun shall rise...' For you, White Man, these are words without meaning. White Man, there is much in the deep, simple wisdom of our forefathers. We were here for centuries. We kept the land, the waters, the air clean and pure, for our children and our children's children. Now that you are here, White Man, the rivers bleed with contamination. The winds moan with the heavy weight of pollution in the air. The land vomits up the poisons which have been fed into it. Our Mother Earth is no longer clean and healthy. She is dying. White Man, in your greedy rush for money and power, you are destroying. Why must you have power over everything? Why can't you live in peace and harmony? Why can't you share the beauty and the wealth which Mother Earth has given us? You do not stop at confining us to small pieces of rock an muskeg. Where are the animals of the wilderness to go when there is no more wilderness? Why are the birds of the skies falling to their extinction? Is there joy for you when you bring down the mighty trees of our forests? No living things seems sacred to you. In the name of progress, everything is cut down. And progress means only profits. White Man, you say that we are a people without dignity. But when we are sick, weak, hungry, poor, when there is nothing for us but death, what are we to do? We cannot accept a life which has been imposed on us. You say that we are drunkards, that we live for drinking. But drinking is a way of dying. Dying without enjoying life. You have given us many diseases. It is true that you have found immunizations for many of these diseases. But this was done more for your own benefit. The worst disease, for which there is no immunity, is the disease of alcoholism. And you condemn us for being its easy victims. And those who do not condemn us weep for us and pity us. So, we the Indian people, we are still dying. The land we lost is dying, too. White Man, you have our land now. Respect it. As we once did. Take care of it. As we once did. Love it. As we once did. White Man, our wisdom is dying. As we are. But take heed, if Indian wisdom dies, you, White Man, will not be far behind. So weep not for us. Weep for yourselves. And for your children. And for their children. Because you are taking everything today. And tomorrow, there will be nothing left for them.
Beatrice Mosionier (In Search of April Raintree)
I’m beginning to find life on Earth…burdensome,” said Federico. “Pandemics, air pollution, ground water contamination...Did you know that caffeine, antibiotics, and even birth-control hormones are finding their way into our drinking water? And now there’s circumstantial evidence that CO2 could be making our food less nutritious! As our numbers continue to approach carrying capacity, life will become less safe. Finally, either a solar flare will fry the electric grid sending civilization back to the 19th century, or the Kessler syndrome will strand humanity on a dying planet for millennia. I’ll gladly leave Earth if presented with the opportunity.
Erasmo Acosta (K3+)
The virus is transmitted primarily through the oral-fecal route when a person ingests contaminated food and water or touches objects that are contaminated and then puts unwashed hands into the mouth. It can also be disseminated directly from person to person through exposure to the phlegm or mucous of an infected individual who coughs or sneezes.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
A variety of circumstances prevailing during the trek into Russia created perfect conditions for microbial diseases to flourish—especially dysentery, which was a much feared affliction of nineteenth-century armies. Also known as Shigellosis, dysentery is a bacterial disease caused by four species of the Shigella genus. Like typhoid and cholera, dysentery is transmitted by the oral-fecal route through the ingestion of food and water contaminated by excrement.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
Spillover to human populations depends on climatic factors, and on human activities. Warm weather, rising sea temperatures, and algae blooms promote the multiplication of bacteria, which can then be ingested by people when they eat fish and crustaceans or when they bathe in or drink contaminated water. Climate change, summer, and such weather determinants as El Niño, which circulates warm surface water and currents that bring nutrients in abundance, promote a profusion of vibrios, which are then available for human consumption.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
I learned economics at my mother’s knee,” Teg said. “Food, water, breathable air, living space not contaminated by poisons—there are many kinds of money and the value changes according to the dependency.
Frank Herbert (Heretics of Dune (Dune, #5))
The horizon of our time is marked by the Fukushima event. Compared to the noisy catastrophes of the earthquake and the tsunami, Tokyo's silent apocalypse is more frightening and suggests a new framework of social expectation for daily life on the planet. The megalopolis is directly exposed to the Fukushima fallout, but life is proceeding almost normally. Only a few people have abandoned the city. Most citizens have stayed there, buying mineral water as they have always done, breathing with facemasks on their mouths as they have always done. A few cases of air and water contamination are denounced. Concerns about food safety have prompted US officials to halt the importation of certain foods from Japan. But the Fukushima effect does not imply a disruption of social life: poison has become a normal feature of daily life, the second nature we have to inhabit.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi (The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance)
Oh Oh! I just read a recipe that suggested I should NOT wash/clean the chicken before preparing it because "the splashing water can contaminate the area". Now, I *know* a Haitian did not post this tidbit, because my mother stops short of spraying the chicken with high-powered hoses filled with lemon juice and vinegar! She'd be horrified!
Liz Faublas
Even the ocean is scared of the small drop of water -that is contaminated, lest it should ignite a chain of deaths!
Priyavrat Thareja
their neighborhood is likely to adjoin a toxic waste site or to have contaminated water flowing from their taps, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by authorities with impunity.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Choosing the best well water filtration system for clean drinking water doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s easier when you know which contaminants are in your water, as there are different water filtration systems that filter out different contaminants. When looking for a well water filtration system, determining whether or not you have hard water and which water flow rate is best for your particular needs is also important. While the right well water filtration system won’t be the same for every home, there are options that can be the most efficient system for your needs. Keep reading to learn about well water filtration system features, and check out the list below of some of the best well water filtration systems for your entire home.
Water filtration systems and Purified Water in Sacramento
Purified water is a kind of water that has been effectively filtered with the goal of removing various impurities from the water. Purified water can be made from both tap water and groundwater, which means that it’s readily available for practically all homeowners. Purified water is considered to be the healthiest type of water, which is why it comes with many notable health benefits. Even though standard tap water is usually safe to drink, this water can still consist of trace amounts of contaminants, which is why it’s recommended that you opt for purified water.
What is Purified Water?
Purified water is water that is mechanically filtered or processed to be cleaned for consumption. Distilled water and deionized water have been the most common forms of purified water, but water can also be purified by other processes including Reverse osmosis, carbon filtration, microfiltration, ultrafiltration, ultraviolet oxidation, or electrodialysis. In recent decades, a combination of the above processes have come into use to produce Purified water of such high purity that its trace contaminants are measured in parts per billion or parts per trillion. Purified water has many uses, largely in science and engineering laboratories and industries, and is produced in a range of purities. Purified water in colloquial English can also refer to water which has been treated to neutralize, but not necessarily remove contaminants considered harmful to humans or animals. Call us at- (510) 556-4380
Purified water in Sacramento / Alkaline bottled water delivery services in Sacramento
They ask us, 'Aren't there bigger issues than the name of a football team?' Well, we know the answer. Of course there are. But the Washington Post doesn't ever phone us to talk about contaminated water.
Kliph Nesteroff (We Had a Little Real Estate Problem)
In this humid, rusty place where women congregate, naked and wet, where they show each other the scars beside their breasts and on their bellies, the bruises on their thighs, the imperfections on their backs, they all talk about misfortune. They complain about husbands, children, aging parents. They confess things without feeling guilty. As I take in these losses, these tragedies, it occurs to me that the water in the pool isn’t so clear after all. It reeks of grief, of heartache. It’s contaminated.
Jhumpa Lahiri (Whereabouts)
Radical fungal technologies can help us respond to some of the many problems that arise from ongoing environmental devastation. Antiviral compounds produced by fungal mycelium reduce colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Voracious fungal appetites can be deployed to break down pollutants, such as crude oil from oil spills, in a process known as mycoremediation. In mycofiltration, contaminated water is passed through mats of mycelium, which filter out heavy metals and break down toxins. In mycofabrication, building materials and textiles are grown out of mycelium and replace plastics and leather in many applications.
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition: How Fungi Make Our Worlds)
Microplastics and nano-plastics are found everywhere in us and the environment. Now microplastics have been found in sediments which have not seen human habitation for hundreds of years. So how did they get there? If both microplastics and nano-plastics can invade all of our bodily systems through pores and filters within the body, the same can be said for the natural filtering systems of different rock layers. No difference from us except we think rock is rock is less able to do it because it's denser. The trouble is that rain is so contaminated with these plastics that they are carried through the rain into the ground water and the subsequently through the different rock layers. So, now we have contaminated groundwater, not only from chemicals, but also plastics as well. And as you all know, we drink 'fresh' ground water because it's so natural. Well, maybe not so natural now.
Anthony T. Hincks
The victims in all this are regular people: the workers who lose their factory jobs in Juárez and Windsor; the workers who get the factory jobs in Shenzhen and Dhaka, jobs that are by this point so degraded that some employers install nets along the perimeters of roofs to catch employees when they jump, or where safety codes are so lax that workers are killed in the hundreds when buildings collapse. The victims are also the toddlers mouthing lead-laden toys; the Walmart employee expected to work over the Thanksgiving holiday only to be trampled by a stampede of frenzied customers, while still not earning a living wage. And the Chinese villagers whose water is contaminated by one of those coal plants we use as our excuse for inaction, as well as the middle class of Beijing and Shanghai whose kids are forced to play inside because the air is so foul.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
ladies at the Lucknow Club, after denying that Indians defecate in public, will remind you, their faces creased with distaste, of the habits of Europe – the right hand used for love-making, toilet paper and food, the weekly bath in a tub of water contaminated by the body of the bather, the washing in a washbasin that has been spat and gargled into – proving by such emotive illustrations not the dirtiness of Europe but the security of India. It is an Indian method of argument, an Indian way of seeing: it is so that squatters and wayside filth begin to disappear.
V.S. Naipaul (An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India (Macmillan Collector's Library))
Did you know that the water in your home could be contaminated? With the Real Water bottled water subscription, your water will taste just like the real thing! Sign up now and get your first three gallons free!
Rafał Kosik (Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence)
I began shoving pills into his mouth. I didn’t have time for this. I wanted to call my son and see that he was okay, talk to my wife and assure her everything was fine. After his mouth was full of pills, I pushed his head under the water, forcing him to gulp down or choke up. I repeated the action three times, until I was sure he’d swallowed enough drugs to kill a Game of Thrones dragon. His bloodstream would soon be more contaminated than Chernobyl circa 1986.
L.J. Shen (Angry God (All Saints High, #3))
continue to be devastated by our use, diversion, and contamination of fresh water. Conflicts over shared water resources are growing. Climate changes are already altering
Peter H. Gleick (Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water)
Conjunctivitis: Types, Symptoms, Prevention & Treatment Conjunctivitis, eye flu or pink eye, is an inflammation of the conjunctiva. The conjunctiva is a transparent membrane covering the eyelid and a part of the eye. Usually, eye flu is caused in the monsoon season by viruses, bacteria, allergies, or other irritants. According to Dr Sunny Narula, MBBS, MD, Consultant- Paediatrician and Neonatologist, eye flu is very common in children during the monsoon. Moreover, in the past few weeks, there has also been a spike in the eye flu cases. Hence, you must take necessary precautions to prevent this from spreading. If you notice any symptoms, visit the best pediatricians in Chandigarh for consultation at the earliest. What are the Symptoms of Eye Flu? The most common symptom of eye flu is redness or inflammation of the eye. Other symptoms include: Itching or burning sensation in the eye. Watering of the eyes. Sensitivity to light. Discharge from eyes. Sticking of eyelids together. What are the Types of Conjunctivitis? The best child specialist doctor in Mohali tells us that there are 3 main types of conjunctivitis: 1.Viral Conjunctivitis This type is caused by a viral infection including cold or flu. It is highly contagious and lasts up to 2 weeks. 2.Bacterial Conjunctivitis This type is caused by a bacterial infection. Bacterial conjunctivitis can also cause yellowish-green discharge from the eye. 3.Allergic Conjunctivitis This type is caused by allergens including pollen or pet dander. It can occur any time of the year and is usually less contagious. How to Prevent Conjunctivitis? Conjunctivitis can be prevented by taking the following measures: Wash your hands frequently, especially before touching your eyes. Avoid sharing pillows, towels, or other personal items. Avoid touching your eyes with your hands. Practice good hygiene, especially during cold or flu season. Use protective eyewear when swimming or doing any activity with the potential risk of eye exposure. How to Treat Conjunctivitis? If you suspect eye flu, the best paediatrician in Mohali recommends the following at-home care tips: 1.Practice Good Hand Hygiene: The hands of your children can be a potential carrier of viruses or bacteria. Inculcate good hand hygiene habits in them. Wash their hands frequently. Avoid sharing towels, eye drops, or any other item that can spread infection. 2.Warm or Cold Compress: Apply a clean, warm compress or ice packs to closed eyes as it helps in soothing eyes and reducing swelling. You can use a soft, lint-free cloth soaked in warm water and place it gently over the closed eyelids for a few minutes. Repeat as needed throughout the day. 3.Clean Eyeglasses: If your child wears glasses, make sure to clean them with mild soap and water to remove any potential contamination. 4.Artificial Tears: Over-the-counter lubricating eye drops called artificial teas in general can keep eyes moist and prevent irritation. Discuss this with your pediatrician and do not self-medicate. 5.Avoid Eye Touching or Rubbing: Children can be easily frustrated with the constant eye irritation. They might find comfort in rubbing their eyes. This, however, can further irritate the conjunctiva and spread the infection to the other eye or other people around. Hence, make sure that your child does not touch the infected eye at all.
Dr. Sunny Narula
humanity was on a collision course with annihilation. Global warming, water table and ocean contamination, air pollution, nuclear war, and the assorted ailments of over-population
Brandt Legg (The Last Librarian (The Justar Journal #1))
humanity was on a collision course with annihilation. Global warming, water table and ocean contamination, air pollution, nuclear war, and the assorted ailments of over-population were creating an acidic-toxic stew.
Brandt Legg (The Last Librarian (The Justar Journal #1))
Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
Elif Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love)
Dear Mom and Dad, This place is terrible. Each day I am subjected to countless atrocities. The food is spoiled and poisonous, and the drinking water is contaminated so there is an outbreak of typhoid. Our cabin collapsed last night in a typhoon, but don’t worry. Only one guy was killed. It’s not all bad. I do have one friend, named Mike. He’s the one who pulled me out of the quicksand. I have to haul garbage every day, but there aren’t too many wild animals at the dump and I’ve only been bitten twice. Mr. Warden, the director, is very nice, and he has a real social conscience. He hires only desperate criminals as counsellors. Our bunk counsellor, whose name is Chip, is a reformed axe-murderer on parole. He has red eyes and yells a lot and keeps an axe under his mattress. Tonight is going to be really fun. Our cabin hasn’t been fixed yet, so we get to sleep in trees. I sure hope the typhoon doesn’t start up again. I’ll be safe and sound so long as Algonkian Island doesn’t sink any further. … P.S. If this letter looks messy it’s because I’m writing it while being chased by a bear.
Gordon Korman (I Want to Go Home!)
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The world around us is a beautiful, supportive environment for human growth and flourishing.  Isn't it amazing how everything we need to live and thrive is given to us by our planet – air, water, food, sunlight? Unfortunately, our modern world is increasingly full of damaging and hostile elements.  Our air contains excess carbon dioxide, methane, and particulates from increasing traffic congestion and burning fossil fuels.  Our water can be contaminated with traces of chlorine, bleach, ammonia, and other chemicals.  Foods are grown in soil treated with chemical fertilizers, sprayed with chemical pesticides, and then processed to include a huge range of additives, artificial flavorings, and food dyes. 
Carla Johnson (Clean Eating Made Easy - Simple Steps for Busy Women who want to Eliminate Fatigue and Feel Great)
The use of coal should be discouraged, limited, and phased out as soon as possible.109 Coal production and consumption causes enormous damages. Coal contains mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, manganese, beryllium, chromium, and other toxic and carcinogenic substances. Coal crushing, processing, and washing releases tons of particulate matter and chemicals that contaminate water, harm public health, and damage ecological systems. Burning coal results in emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, particulates and mercury, all of which affect air quality and damage public health.
Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
Intuitive toxicology is the term that Slovic uses for the way most people assess the risk of chemicals. His research reveals that this approach is distinct from the methods used by toxicologists, and that it tends to produce different results. For toxicologists, “the dose makes the poison.” Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful. In exploring this thinking, Slovic suggests that people who are not toxicologists may apply a “law of contagion” to toxicity. Just as brief exposure to a microscopic virus can result in lifelong disease, we assume that exposure to any amount of a harmful chemical will permanently contaminate our bodies. “Being contaminated,” Slovic observes, “clearly has an all-or-none quality to it—like being alive or pregnant.” Fear of contamination rests on the belief, widespread in our culture as in others, that something can impart its essence to us on contact. We are forever polluted, as we see it, by contact with a pollutant. And the pollutants we have come to fear most are the products of our own hands. Though toxicologists tend to disagree with this, many people regard natural chemicals as inherently less harmful than man-made chemicals. We seem to believe, against all evidence, that nature is entirely benevolent.
Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
We begin to make human systems and industries fitting when we recognize that all sustainability (just like all politics) is local. We connect them to local material and energy flows, and to local customs, needs, and tastes, from the level of the molecule to the level of the region itself. We consider how the chemicals we use affect local water and soil - rather than contaminate, how might they nourish? - what the product is made from, the surroundings in which it is made, how our processes interact with what is happening upstream and downstream, how we can create meaningful occupations, enhance the region's economic and physical health, accrue biological and technical wealth for the future.
William McDonough
Tap water is another example of a legally condoned public health hazard. As early as the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) in China, the imperial government strictly enforced laws which required the public to clean their wells and water storage facilities regularly in order to maintain the purity of public drinking water. These laws also specified that pipes, vats, and basins used to transport and store drinking water must be made of clay, not metal, because the health hazards of heavy metals werw well known to Chinese health authorities. Today, public water utilities poison our drinking water with chlorine, fluoride, aluminum salts, and other substances which they call 'purifiers', then run it through metal pipes which further contaminate the water with lead, iron, nickel, cadmium, and other metals that are extremely toxic to the human system. Public utilities and private corporations combine to poison the food, air, and water upon which we must all rely to stay alive. Orthodox Western medical practice compounds these public health hazards by ignoring them as causes of disease, then further aggravates the situation by prescribing toxic drugs, injections, vaccines, and radical surgery as cures for the ills they cause.
Daniel Reid
Bacteria begins to form in wounds, even relatively clean ones, after 6 hours. All wounds should be treated as contaminated and require cleansing to prevent infection and promote healing. "Disinfectants (such as isopropyl alcohol, povidone-iodine, and hydrogen peroxide) and soaps and detergents should not be put directly into wounds because they can damage viable tissue and may actually increase the incidence of wound infection. These substances may be used to scrub around a wound prior to wound cleaning, with soap and water working as well as anything else.
Buck Tilton (Wilderness First Responder: How to Recognize, Treat, and Prevent Emergencies in the Backcountry)
General Wound Cleaning Note: A rescuer should wash his or her hands and put on protective gloves and protective eyewear before cleaning an open wound. All wounds acquired in a wilderness environment should be regarded as contaminated and, therefore, require cleansing to prevent infection and promote healing. There are three effective methods of wound cleaning available to the WFR: You can scrub, irrigate, and debride. Scrubbing: Disinfectants (such as isopropyl alcohol, povidone-iodine, and hydrogen peroxide) and soaps and detergents should not be put directly into wounds because they can damage viable tissue and may actually increase the incidence of wound infection. These substances may be used to scrub around a wound prior to wound cleaning, with soap and water working as well as anything else. Irrigating: The most effective and practical method of removing bacteria and debris from a wound involves using a high-pressure irrigation syringe. Irrigation syringes that supply adequate pressure are available commercially in quality first-aid kits. Without an irrigation syringe, you can put water in a plastic bag, punch a pinhole in the bag, and squeeze the water out forcefully, or you can melt a pinhole in the center of the lid of a water bottle with a hot needle and squeeze the water out forcefully. These and other improvised methods are not nearly as effective as an irrigation syringe, but they may be the best you can do. Simply rinsing or soaking a wound is inadequate to remove bacteria. The cleanest water available, most preferably water disinfected for drinking, should be used for irrigating. The tip of the irrigating device should be held 1 to 2 inches above the wound surface, and the plunger of the syringe forcefully depressed. Be sure to tilt the wound to irrigate contaminants out and away from the wound. The volume of irrigation fluid required varies with the size of the wound and the degree of contamination, but plan on using at least a half liter of water. Note: Wound irrigation is the single most important factor in preventing infection.
Buck Tilton (Wilderness First Responder: How to Recognize, Treat, and Prevent Emergencies in the Backcountry)
But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.
David Gessner (All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West)
It is of interest that ‘brands’ came into being in the 19th century to protect the public from contaminated, adulterated or falsely described food. Cheating our fellow human beings existed long before industrialisation. Watering the milk or making bread with contaminated flour goes back to ancient times.2 Brands were established to indicate trust in product quality because the buyer could trace the provider. However the current use of brand power by big food corporations is not driven by the quest to improve nutrition but to manipulate the psychological perceptions of the consumer in order to maximise profits. That initial trust of the ‘brand’ has been exploited to extremes and has become a worshipped marketing tool.
Gabrielle Palmer (Complementary Feeding: Nutrition, Culture and Politics)
It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!
Rowan Williams (Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer)
In all bluefolk the immune system is quite advanced. A large number of relevant genes seem to be imported from the crocodile: those creatures live in stagnant, muddy water in much warmer climates, where they are exposed to many diseases and parasites. Wrestling with prey or each other, they may be wounded, but the dirty swamp water in the cut is mostly harmless. It was a very important acquisition by the Auravelus; it meant that virtually none of the old bioweapons were effective against them. More ordinary bluefolk could still suffer under a few recipes, but often no more than a rash. Chemical weapons had to be used instead. Infection or contamination through wounds was largely useless; our Asian friends determined that inhalation was a more viable route. Concoctions made against the lungs, as aerosols, were the most successful
Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
Later, in one of the few times he attended church as an adult, he discovered that it was about much more than a piece of fruit. Knowledge of evil is contaminating, and in this new manifestation, it makes him pull back from her hug. ‘Poppy?’ Small eddies of anxiety ripple over her face. ‘Poppy. Richie Dog and me have made you breakfast . . .’ Her voice trails off, uncertain. With some effort, George rallies. ‘How’s that for luck? I’m hungry as a lion.’ He waggles a finger at Richie. ‘I hope you aren’t giving me dog biscuits for breakfast, young pup.’ Rory giggles. It’s a sign she feels safe, that she hasn’t done anything wrong after all. ‘You’re so funny, Poppy.’ In the kitchen, George spoons up the cornflakes from their inundation of milk and yums at his undercooked toast. ‘I didn’t make the tea,’ she says. ‘Richie and me are a bit young for boiling water.’ She’s so serious, so anxious to be responsible. George grins. ‘Very wise. I’ll make the tea and you can have a cup, just for making such a nice breakfast.’ He pours her a milky tea and stirs in two teaspoons of sugar. Rory’s eyes gleam. This is an unexpected treat. ‘What about Richie? He helped, too.’ ‘I might share my toast with him,’ George says, tearing off a substantial chunk. He chuckles to himself as the dog wolfs down his portion. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. ‘Best breakfast I’ve had in years,’ he says, swigging the last of
Tess Evans (Mercy Street)
birth defects, as well as congenital heart problems, were elevated in communities served by a drinking water reservoir that had been contaminated with the herbicide atrazine. Atrazine, on the market since 1959 and banned for use in much of Europe, is the most popular pesticide used in the United States.
Sandra Steingraber (Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (A Merloyd Lawrence Book))
We also live with rising levels of chemical contaminants, and researchers are finding more and clearer correlations between exposure to those contaminants, levels of obesity, and levels of diabetes. The main culprits are the so-called persistent organic pollutants—pesticides, PCBs, and other compounds that build up in our food, water, and bodies2—and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like bisphenol A (also known as BPA).
Harriet Brown (Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It)
DENGUE FEVER (BREAKBONE FEVER) Dengue fever is a viral infection found throughout Central America. In Costa Rica outbreaks involving thousands of people occur every year. Dengue is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, which often bite during the daytime and are usually found close to human habitations, often indoors. They breed primarily in artificial water containers such as jars, barrels, cans, plastic containers and discarded tires. Dengue is especially common in densely populated, urban environments. Dengue usually causes flulike symptoms including fever, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, nausea and vomiting, often followed by a rash. Most cases resolve uneventfully in a few days. Severe cases usually occur in children under the age of 15 who are experiencing their second dengue infection. There is no treatment for dengue fever except taking analgesics such as acetaminophen/paracetamol (Tylenol) and drinking plenty of fluids. Severe cases may require hospitalization for intravenous fluids and supportive care. There is no vaccine. The key to prevention is taking insect-protection measures. HEPATITIS A Hepatitis A is the second-most-common travel-related infection (after traveler’s diarrhea). It’s a viral infection of the liver that is usually acquired by ingestion of contaminated water, food or ice, though it may also be acquired by direct contact with infected persons. Symptoms may include fever, malaise, jaundice, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Most cases resolve without complications, though hepatitis A occasionally causes severe liver damage. There is no treatment. The vaccine for hepatitis A is extremely safe and highly effective. You should get vaccinated before you go to Costa Rica. Because the safety of hepatitis A vaccine has not been established for pregnant women or children under the age of two, they should instead be given a gammaglobulin injection. LEISHMANIASIS Leishmaniasis occurs in the mountains and jungles of all Central American countries. The infection is transmitted by sand flies, which are about one-third the size of mosquitoes. Most cases occur in newly cleared forest or areas of secondary growth. The highest incidence is in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It causes slow-growing ulcers over exposed parts of the body There is no vaccine. RABIES Rabies is a viral infection of the brain and spinal cord that is almost always fatal. The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals and is typically transmitted through an animal bite, though contamination of any break in the skin with infected saliva may result in rabies. Rabies occurs in all Central American countries. However, in Costa Rica only two cases have been reported over the last 30 years. TYPHOID Typhoid fever is caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated by a species of salmonella known as Salmonella typhi . Fever occurs in virtually all cases. Other symptoms may include headache, malaise, muscle aches, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain. A pretrip vaccination for typoid is recommended, but not required. It’s usually given orally, and is also available as an injection. TRAVELER’S DIARRHEA Tap water is safe and of a high quality in Costa Rica, but when you’re far off the beaten path it’s best to avoid tap water unless it has been boiled, filtered or chemically disinfected (iodine tablets). To prevent diarrhea, be wary of dairy products that might contain unpasteurized milk; and be highly selective when eating food from street vendors.
Lonely Planet (Discover Costa Rica (Lonely Planet Discover))
Avoid Calcutta’s un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown.
James O'Reilly (Travelers' Tales India: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides))