Feb. 18, 2023 - Epoch Times
16:41
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| The situation over in Ohio is beginning to heat up, with the water supply becoming one of the main issues. | |
| You see, earlier this week, the residents of East Palestine were told by the Ohio EPA that not only was everything fine, but that also the local water was safe to drink. | |
| They allegedly made that determination after testing the water in several different wells that feed into the town's municipal water system. | |
| But the local residents of the city are not buying it. | |
| Here are several videos of local people, as well as the Ohio Senator, Mr. | |
| J.D. Vance, showing what appears to be toxic, bubbling water around town. | |
| Dead worms and dead fish all throughout this water. | |
| Something I just discovered is that if you scrape the creek bed, it's like chemicals coming out of the ground. | |
| Can you show, can you come here? | |
| And let me just show this to people. | |
| I don't know if you're going to see this on camera, but watch this. | |
| Just see that chemical pop out of the creek. | |
| This is disgusting. | |
| As you can see, while the top layer of the water seems okay, once you throw something into it, or you disturb the water in some way, the contents on the bottom begin to bubble up, and they look rainbow-colored, similar to what gasoline in water looks like. | |
| Other residents in the city posted videos of them boiling the local water and showing that once they did, a strange white residue remained. | |
| And of course, there are other videos showing dead fish floating around the local waterways, leading many residents to, for some odd reason, not trust the guidance of their local government. | |
| However, amidst these videos and amidst these reports, The director of the EPA made a special trip out to East Palestine, wherein he walked along a creek, which at the time still smelled of chemicals, and he tried to reassure the skeptical residents that the water was okay to drink and that they should be trusting of their government. | |
| He was part of his statement. | |
| Quote... | |
| I'm asking that they trust the government. | |
| I know that's hard. | |
| We know there's a lack of trust. | |
| We're testing for everything that was on that train. | |
| But notably, he did not drink the water himself. | |
| And later in the day, when a local reporter asked the director of the EPA whether he would allow his own kids to either play in the creek or to drink the local water, well, here was his response. | |
| You know, what I would say is, if those homes have been tested, And if those homes have been tested by the state and given a clean bill of health, yes, as a father, I trust the science, I trust the methodology that this state is using. | |
| Trust the science and drink the water. | |
| But the story actually gets a lot deeper than this, because although what we're seeing in East Palestine is very striking with it, Dead fish and the obvious chemicals that are in the water. | |
| The truth is, what's happening to the water and the environment in Ohio is just a much higher profile version of what the EPA has allowed to happen throughout the whole country over the last 70 years, with the rise of what are known as forever chemicals. | |
| Meaning that despite the fact that you might be living in Oklahoma, Alabama, Oregon, or somewhere else in the country that's not necessarily close to Ohio, and even though your water in the tap might look fine on the surface, very likely you are ingesting these forever chemicals just the same. | |
| However, let me back up for a quick moment and introduce you what these forever chemicals are actually all about and how it is that they came to proliferate our entire environment. | |
| And I hope that if you appreciate content like this, you do take a quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons, which quite literally forced the YouTube algorithm to share this video out to ever more people. | |
| Now, seven full months before this disaster in Ohio, the EPA released a warning about the dangers of what they refer to as forever chemicals in our drinking water. | |
| Specifically, in that statement, the EPA wrote that these forever chemicals, which are found not only in drinking water but also in things like cosmetics, food packaging, dental floss, among thousands of other products, were found to be a lot more harmful than they previously thought, being now linked to various illnesses, | |
| various cancers, And PFAS is not a single chemical. | |
| It's instead a large class of man-made chemicals that have been manufactured and used in a huge variety of industries since the late 1940s. | |
| And I really do mean a huge variety of industries. | |
| These synthetic chemicals are used to make everything from food wrappers, sunscreen, nonstick pans, to makeup, hand lotion, dental floss, outdoor gear, to your smartphones, pesticides that are used on the various different plots of land, the foam that's used inside of fire extinguishers, waterproof coatings for clothing and for furniture, as well as hundreds of other products that are designed to withstand heat, water, grease, or stains. | |
| And so when you see a giant list of products like that, it becomes very clear that PFAS is not just one thing. | |
| It has many uses and many forms. | |
| In fact, there are currently over 9,000 known chemicals in the PFAS family, but they all have two things in common. | |
| They're all man-made, and they all contain, at the molecular level, chains of carbon and fluorine atoms bonded together. | |
| And these molecular chains are important because the bonds between the carbon and the fluorine are so strong that they cannot be broken by water, they cannot be broken by enzymes from bacteria, and they cannot be broken by most other natural substances that you would find in the environment. | |
| Meaning that these strong chemical bonds make it such that these PFAS chemicals just do not naturally degrade. | |
| They stick around in the human body as well as in the environment for a very, very long time. | |
| And they're also very stable in water, so that they can travel thousands of miles from their original source without being degraded. | |
| That's why people refer to them as forever chemicals, because once they're there, they're very hard to get rid of. | |
| And because the use of these PFAS chemicals over the past 70 years now has just been so prolific, they are, as of today, found everywhere. | |
| That's because they are released into the environment during the manufacturing process. | |
| They are disposed of by being either thrown into landfills or incinerated, and so in that process they wind up in the soil, the water, and the air. | |
| They leak out of the products that you and I actually use, such as if you wash clothing that contains these chemicals, or if you drink water from bottles that contain BPA, those chemicals are leaching into the water supply and into our bodies. | |
| And then lastly, because PFAS chemicals don't easily break down after they're ingested into the human body, they build up over time in our bloodstream. | |
| In fact, according to a study that was conducted by the CDC, Over 99% of the American population has blood which contains these PFAS chemicals. | |
| That same study, by the way, it also found that the degree to which you have these PFAS chemicals in your bloodstream actually depends on various different factors, such as on your diet, where exactly in the country you live, what you're exposed to both at home and at work, and even things that seem rather innocuous, such as the type of clothing that you wear or the type of dental floss that you use when you brush your teeth. | |
| Meaning, that depending on your lifestyle, you might have less or more of these chemicals in your system, but regardless, almost everyone has at least some of them there. | |
| That's because, no matter where in the country you live, and no matter what type of lifestyle you subscribe to, It doesn't really matter because you still need to drink water. | |
| And because these PFAS chemicals don't degrade easily, with some of them having half-lives that are over 1,000 years, and because, again, they are extremely mobile and can travel far, far from their original source in water, they've come to proliferate the entire water supply. | |
| It's currently estimated that over 200 million Americans are ingesting these chemicals from their water. | |
| That's about two-thirds of the entire country drinking water that's contaminated with these PFAS chemicals. | |
| Although, to be frank, given the scope of the situation, I'm actually surprised it's not 100%. | |
| Regardless, though, the next obvious question here is, so what? | |
| What is the problem with having these PFAS chemicals present in the environment as well as in so many human bodies? | |
| Because while the water in East Palestine, Ohio, obviously looks bad, you obviously wouldn't want to drink that, our local water looks decent. | |
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| I'll also throw a link down in the description box below. | |
| So, how bad can having these little microscopic PFAS chemicals inside of there really be? | |
| Well, as I alluded to earlier, there's already a solid body of research dating all the way back to the 1970s, which shows that PFAS chemicals are associated with a wide variety of ailments, including suppressed immune function, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney disease, liver damage, and so on and so forth. | |
| And because there are over 9,000 of the chemicals that fall under the PFAS umbrella, the sky is really the limit on what they can do. | |
| Some are more toxic than others. | |
| In fact, some PFAS chemicals are so toxic that they can cause problems with your respiratory system after you inhale them for just a brief amount of time. | |
| Furthermore, it's been found that the low doses of these PFAS chemicals in people's drinking water have been linked to the suppression of the immune system, an elevated risk of cancer, developmental challenges to little kids, as well as harm to the reproductive system. | |
| And just as a fun aside, since the 1970s, the average male sperm count has fallen by more than 50%, although no one seems to know why. | |
| Regardless, the next obvious question here is if we know about all these problems, How can it be possible that companies here in America are allowed to continue using these PFAS chemicals in their manufacturing process? | |
| And this is where the story, you can say, takes a turn for the absurd. | |
| Because you might remember, vaguely, how in the early 2000s, there was a lot of attention placed on two of these PFAS chemicals. | |
| Specifically, on perfluorooctaneic acid, which was used to make Teflon products, and perfluorooctane sulfonate, which was used as an ingredient in Scotchgard. | |
| Basically, once the dangers of these two chemicals became public mainstream knowledge, manufacturers across all of America voluntarily phased out their usage. | |
| They stopped using those two specific chemicals. | |
| But products still needed to be manufactured. | |
| And so what the manufacturers did was that they tweaked their recipes and started to use different PFAS chemicals that gave them the same results. | |
| Because again, there are over 9,000 chemicals in the PFAS family, and what the manufacturers did in the early 2000s was that they stopped the usage of just two of them, of PFOS and PFOA. But here's the kicker. | |
| Because there are just so many different variants of these chemicals, there's not really a lot of scientific knowledge on how harmful each one of these variants is. | |
| And so this gave rise to a very strange situation where the manufacturers, and I'm not referring to Teflon and Scotchgard, but rather all manufacturers in the U.S., they can change their formulation, they can change the PFAS chemicals that they're using in their products, and then they can turn around and tell the public that they are no longer using the harmful toxins. | |
| But, molecularly, the new formulation that they're going to be using shares many similarities with the previous one. | |
| And if then, at a later point in time, the new formulation is found to also cause health problems, then the company can just once again swap it out for the next variation. | |
| And the process just keeps going and going and going. | |
| And if you thought that the EPA was late to the game in East Palestine, Ohio, well, in regard to these forever chemicals, the EPA was quite literally decades behind the ball. | |
| That's because, despite the fact that these PFAS chemicals have been shown to be present in the human blood since around the 1970s, and despite multiple studies showing these PFAS chemicals to cause serious health problems, the EPA has taken very little meaningful action until only two years ago. | |
| That was when the EPA established what they called the Council on PFAS, with the stated goal of the Council being to develop a strategy to protect human health as well as the environment. | |
| Then, a few months after establishing the Council, in October of 2021, the EPA announced their National PFAS Testing Strategy, which was a document that essentially broke down their strategy for choosing the 24 PFAS chemicals That they thought were the most likely culprits to cause serious harm to humans. | |
| Up on your screen, you can see the list of chemicals that they believe are good candidates to begin their testing on. | |
| Which of course sounds all well and good. | |
| But what's really alarming here is when you read the opening lines of this document, you suddenly come to realize how little the EPA actually knows about the potential dangers that these PFAS chemicals cause to both the environment as well as human bodies. | |
| Let me read to you the opening statement here. | |
| And as you're listening to it, really consider the fact that this was written The Environmental Protection Agency, otherwise known as the EPA, needs to evaluate a large number of PFAS for potential human and ecological effects. | |
| Most of the hundreds of PFAS currently in commerce have limited or no toxicity data, and if the EPA attempts to research them one at a time, it will be impossible for the EPA to expeditiously understand, let alone address, The risks these substances may pose to human health and the environment. | |
| And so the EPA's plan, at least their initial plan, is to take that list of 24 PFAS chemicals that we looked at earlier and to target the businesses that manufacture them, that produce them, that transport them, that use them, and or that dispose of these chemicals, and to have those companies provide the EPA with a laundry list of information that the EPA will then use to assess their threat level. | |
| Meaning that within the next 5 to 10 years, we can know whether the things that are being manufactured today are dangerous. | |
| And that, my friends, is what I call living at the speed of government. | |
| Trust the science, drink the water, and trust your government. | |
| Now, while they are conducting this testing, I will leave you with a few tips on how you yourself can limit your exposure to these harmful chemicals. | |
| First of all, I would consider using a water filter. | |
| One of the most popular ones, at least in the Prepper community, is the Berkey water filters, which claim, at least according to their official documents, to be able to filter out or at least reduce PFAS chemicals. | |
| By the way, they are not sponsoring this episode, but they are the brand that's usually recommended on the Prepper message boards. | |
| but they're also pretty expensive. | |
| And so as an alternative, really most water filters that use either activated charcoal, reverse osmosis, or ion exchange filtration methods, they should work well to reduce PFAS chemicals in the drinking water. | |
| That in terms of food, consider avoiding the use of nonstick cookware when preparing your meals at home, since the chemicals that line most of these pans are loaded with PFAS chemicals. | |
| And when you order takeaway from a restaurant or you order in from a restaurant, just note that a lot of the packaging that's used to wrap and contain the food is often treated with these PFAS chemicals in order to stop the grease and the liquids from soaking through. | |
| That when you buy clothing, especially clothing that's advertised as being either waterproof or stain proof, consider reading the label and perhaps check whether that particular item of clothing is PFAS or PFC free. | |
| Then when you're buying cosmetics, try to avoid the ones that contain chemicals with the words fluoro or PTFE in their names. | |
| And then lastly, while it might seem hopeless, things might actually be turning for the slightly better. | |
| Because even though the EPA is decades late to the game, there has been enough public pressure for companies in the U.S. to reduce their use of PFAS chemicals more and more. | |
| And because of that, what appears to be happening is that there is a corresponding reduction in the level of PFAS chemicals in the American bloodstream. | |
| This chart here, which came from the CDC and is updated every two years, it measures the level of PFAS chemicals in Americans' blood. | |
| And ever since the Teflon and Scotchgard controversies in the early 2000s, you can see that the level of PFAS chemicals in our blood has reduced by about 85%. | |
| Meaning that perhaps there is hope on the horizon. | |
| If you'd like to read more about what's happening in East Palestine, Ohio, or if you'd like to go through my research notes for today's episode regarding the water supply in all of America, I'll throw all those links down into the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And if you think I missed something, including any tips and tricks that perhaps you know about that can help reduce the amount of chemicals in our households, well, please leave them in the comments section below. | |
| I'll be reading them myself over the weekend, and I'm sure many of the viewers would appreciate them as well. | |
| And lastly, I'd like to give a big shout-out to Mr. | |
| Eric Schumacher, our awesome researcher who helped pull a lot of this data together and make sense of it all. | |
| In fact, he went so deep into these PFAS chemicals that he now glows in the dark. | |
| And if he could, I'm sure he would remind you to smash those like and subscribe buttons if you haven't already. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times. |
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