Rocket fuel (Perchlorate) is in the news…again.
Rocket fuel chemical found in dozens of food items.
Testing showed that “fast food and fresh produce had the highest levels, while beverages, seafood and meats had the lowest.”
However, rocket fuel contamination has been well known for decades as a contaminant, widespread in the water supply. How does rocket fuel get into the food and water?
Most drinking water contamination comes from activities related to the manufacture, disposal, and research of propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics, as well as to accidental releases from manufacturing facilities and rocket launch failures, according to the National Institutes of Health’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. There are other sources of contamination, too, according to the ATSDR, including fireworks, road safety flares, and certain fertilizers. When crops are irrigated with contaminated water, that leads to contaminated produce.
The scientific way around any toxin is to normalize and naturalize it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states, Perchlorate may occur naturally, particularly in arid regions such as the southwestern United States.
Perchlorate is anything but natural.
As a known goitrogen, Perchlorate prevents the uptake of iodine to affect the thyroid. Along with chloride and fluoride, added to public water supplies, as well as lead, PCBs, pesticides, nitrates, formaldehyde, and other toxins, Perchlorate is only one reason for a global epidemic of thyroid disease.
Thus, Perchlorate is not the only toxin in the water.
In 2016, toxic water made headlines when the EPA announced that water was unsafe to drink in Flint, Michigan due to lead contamination. But water dangers in Flint go back to 2003. By 2017, the consequences of drinking toxic water turned up as an increase in fetal deaths and a drop in fertility rates. In 2024, the EPA says lead in Flint water is at acceptable levels.
…financial motives are causing government science agencies to ignore inconvenient truths—like high levels of lead in public drinking water. – Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who helped expose the Flint water crisis, February 4, 2016
Instead of reassuring residents of Michigan, that lead could be filtered from the water using carbon filters, the government supplied bottled water – one bottle per day per resident – bottles which carry their own toxins of nanoplastics.
The researchers found that, on average, a liter of bottled water included about 240,000 tiny pieces of plastic. About 90% of these plastic fragments were nanoplastics. – NIH, January 2024
Ironically, most bottled water in the U.S. is tap water.
In 2018, Mark Edwards, the Virginia Tech researcher who helped expose the 2016 Flint, Michigan water crisis, was barred from testing well water in South Carolina.
Not Safe To Drink
Agencies, such as the Department of Natural Resources, and the EPA claim public water supplies are safe to drink. Some of the reported water-related disasters over the last decade show otherwise:
Fluoridation of water using waste byproducts (hydrofluorsilicic acid) from the phosphate fertilizer industry.
August 2015 Gold Mine disaster in Colorado that sent 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater (lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, uranium, cyanide, sulfuric acid, etc.) into rivers that supply drinking water to at least three states (Colorado, New Mexico and Utah) as well as the Navajo Nation. The spill resulted from a blow-out, a risk that EPA knew about, but are washing their hands of any responsibility.
November 2015 Mining disaster in Brazil, from the Samarco mine in an area where around 150,000 people are still reliant on deliveries of drinking water. “The best thing that can happen now is for the mud to flow out to sea as quickly as possible,” said Antonio de Padua Almeida, a biologist and head of the local Comboios nature reserve. “The mud will have much greater impact on the river than on the sea.”