PJ 54
CHAPTER 25
REC #1 HATONN

MON., SEP. 14, 1992 8:06 A.M. YEAR 6, DAY 29

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1992,
KNOW WHAT YOU FACE WITH CONTAMINATED
WATER FROM VIRUS
You-the-people will be told that there is no virus found in the water supply which is contaminated. We speak here about the specific location of Golden Hills (Tehachapi area), Calif. It is brought home because I am HERE and you ones will "listen" to me and act. I do not yet have audience elsewhere who will act quickly enough to make impact.

We have gone through the entire process and explanation of "Groundwater" because in THIS instance it is groundwater which is in point but the entire water supply of your nation is contaminated. To understand and realize this I ask that you read on and digest the entire written offering--NOT just personal pe­rusal and then toss aside if you think you live on the safe side of the the break-down point of the piping system. Tehachapi is in trouble also but no one has told you. Due to drought you all have terrible water for consumption and a whole nation is being contaminated with substance (viruses) which cannot be ever "cured". It may seem a small issue now but think what happens as the excretion from sick ones produces even more contamina­tion for these particular viruses are NOT KILLED by any cur­rent water treatment methods.

I ask my ones to act TODAY to get action going--BEFORE this paper is released because you will be swamped with calls and pleas for help after it comes public.

Be prepared to field calls.

You may wish to have extra phones manned so prepare volun­teers. We will offer no more than backup services until com­munity response and volunteer help arrives. If it does not ar­rive, then do the best you can but do not dwell on other than immediate personnel if others refuse to carry their own respon­sibilities. "Individual" frivolous suits will only be distraction and cause NO RECLAMATION AT ALL FOR ANYONE--SO PLEASE, USE YOUR HEADS. ONES IN OUR MIDST WHO ARE HERE ONLY TO PULL US DOWN HAD BEST TAKE A GOOD HARD LOOK AT THEMSELVES AND ACTIONS FOR YOU ARE ONLY DAMAGING SELVES. I WILL NOT WALK ONE STEP OUT OF MY WAY TO HELP MY EN­EMY WHEN MY OWN ARE PERSECUTED. PONDER IT CAREFULLY!

As you read backup information it is going to be a temptation to forget what the Constitutional Law Center (CLC) is actually doing, i.e., prosecuting a Board of Directors, etc. This revolves not so much around the water itself but rather in the KNOWING of the danger and refusing to alert the public. Keep focus or you shall be distracted into avenues of response which are not going to serve your cause. The "Board" couldn't probably help the "cause" or contamination--but that they have known and failed to act, is the charge in point. The water problems are an entirely different matter and need separate attention--immedi­ately. However, you begin where you can make impact and get publicity before you can actually CHANGE a system.

HEPATIC DAMAGE
Ones with hepatic damage already present are targets for death and it will never be told what was the cause of death. This as­sault is planned to serve that very need--depopulation without knowledge of cause of death. If you are an abuser of drugs cleansed through the liver, a Lupus diagnosed person with organ involvement (this will always include "liver") or a simple "alcoholic" or frequent user to the extent of even minor damage to the hepatic system--YOU ARE A TARGET.

It IS the contaminant in the water right now which causes im­mediate reaction to the source problem in the liver of the hu­man. The REAL culprit is that which affects the liver and also causes the various forms of Hepatitis (meaning: inflammation of the liver). The pathogen works in concert with the substance al­ready present as toxins to and in the liver and causes exactly what you witness in Hepatitis, etc. The toxins are in the hepatic system and when stricken by this particular type of virus there is a major reaction, illness and, in damaged persons, full blown seizures, convulsions, heart inflammation, heart/lung inflamma­tion, heart "attack", symptoms of Hepatitis and Mononucleosis (general fatigue, malaise and liver damage symptoms of all kinds). There will be a reaction to fatty foods and an inability to break down glucose properly; this being response of the mito­chondria in inability to properly function. The seizures are the most damaging and some will have been having them under certain circumstances without realizing it. There WILL BE NO MEMORY OF THE ACTUAL SEIZURE ITSELF. This will manifest in signs of falling, loss of bladder and/or bowel con­trol, bruising from damage during falls at onset of seizure---IN AN ALCOHOL RELATED SITUATION IT WILL OCCUR MOST OFTEN FOLLOWING GASTROENTERITIS AND NO INTAKE OF SUBSTANCE.

The response of paramedics and hospital attendants will be "withdrawal" but in actuality the symptoms will not mimic fully withdrawal or substance seizures. In fact, the patient will usu­ally be considered well and be discharged within a very short time if brought to emergency care.

If admitted for hospitalization, the diagnosis will most likely be listed as Hepatitis (if organism can be isolated) or Lupus for this virus gives symptoms and can even mimic test results found in Lupus. This is exactly the WAY AIDS WAS INTRODUCED--BEHIND OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES BUT IN THE U.S. IN THE INOCULATIONS AGAINST HEPATITIS.

The virus introduced will, at some time shortly noted, be categorized as an AIDS causing virus. It is already on the list as revised. Check first your prison populations and then the general public--you will find Hepatitis B and C now listed as "epidemic" in some states, such as California.

There are great interesting observations to make. Check what is happening--especially in households where there is a known al­coholic--AS THAT PERSON STOPS DRINKING. THE SYMPTOMS WILL EXACERBATE IN ALL INSTANCES. THERE ARE NOW ADDITIVES INTO WINES AND ESPE­CIALLY THE "CLEAR" ALCOHOLIC SUBSTANCES WHICH ARE INTRODUCED TO INTERACT WITH THE VIRUS IN POINT. IT IS JUST AS A HERPES (COLD SORE) WILL BREAK FORTH UNDER GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES. THIS, JUST AS A HERPES VIRUS, IS NEVER CURED OR KILLED--IT WILL REMAIN IN THE BODY FOR THE REST OF THE LIFESPAN, READY TO BECOME ACTIVE IN GIVEN SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES, USUALLY ACCOM­PANIED BY SEVERE STRESS.

In the situation wherein you have damage attack severe enough to affect the nervous system you have a really potentially deadly setup. The same symptoms will be going on in affected areas, in hundreds of households. If the person, for instance, is an al­cohol user you can expect the worst responses to come with no intake of substance. If you have persons with other causes and diagnoses (i.e., Lupus) you will have myocardial response in all probability with or without other symptoms but severe illness and acute (almost instant and sometimes "instant") response to simply a "drink of water" almost as in the response to rabies in­fection.

As the liver becomes compromised the brain neuron interrup­tions result in seizures or heart attacks and usually the actual cause of symptoms is MISdiagnosed.

"YELLOW" JAUNDICE A CLUE
Your major CLUE in this local contamination report is the printed word regarding symptoms wherein "jaundice" is one of the symptoms along with gastrointestinal upheavals. Jaundice is ALWAYS resultant of a compromise insult to the hepatic (liver)-billiary system. If jaundice is present, as it was with per­sons immediately in point--the toxin is already at work and the person is already in toxic response in a major way. It may not be apparent but the liver is under severe attack and this is irre­versible damage. If symptoms are allowed to continue there will be total nervous system response and actual brain damage resulting in seizures and ultimate mental incapacity.

The population is TRAINED to BLAME whatever APPEARS most obvious. That is intentional so that no one notices until AFTER the damage is done that anything is going on. The re­actions will occur first in already compromised systems and therefore diagnosis will be missed in the first complaints and, therefore, there will be no assault against the perpetrators until AFTER the disease is in full-blown epidemic proportion. Just as AIDS was intended for a certain segment to miss detection in time to stem the process, so is this next onslaught of introduced death-viruses. This will hit, first, the alcohol and drug users and those already compromised by systemic dis-ease such as hepatitis and systemic lupus.

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE YOU SEE, CHELAS, YOU ARE UNDERGOING TOTAL AND DEADLY ATTACK AND FEW ARE ABLE TO SHAKE OFF THE SHACKLES OF BLIND IGNORANCE TO TAKE ACTION IN TIME TO STOP THIS INSANITY.

Dharma, I ask that the items brought as confirmation be placed herein--if I cannot cause you to look at this--perhaps you will SEE SOLID EVIDENCE. I know that you ones had no access to this information prior to my introduction of the matter--but please do not waste time in pondering and lingering over possi­ble reactions of the public--GET IT OUT THERE! YOU ONES ARE BEING SLAIN AS DELIBERATELY AS IF YOU WERE ON THE BATTLEFIELD, WITH BULLETS AS AMMUNI­TION AGAINST YOU, THE TARGET. THIS IS AS SERI­OUS AS IT GETS.

QUOTE:

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, "THIS WORLD" section, AUG. 23, 1992. FEAR OF FAUCETS; Do our water-treat­ment plants protect us against dangerous viruses in our drinking water?

For years a tiny handful of scientists suspected that there was something wrong with the way cities purify drinking water. Pierre Payment, however, was not among them and, on a wa­ger, the Montreal virologist designed an experiment to prove the water skeptics WRONG. But science can turn upon small events: Payment lost the bet and demonstrated that our drinking water may not be as pure as we like to think it is.

In dispute was the significance of a small number of viruses. Although Payment had been finding viruses in Quebec rivers and tap water for years, conventional wisdom said that those viruses were not responsible for widespread disease. In 1985, while attending a microbiology conference in Washington, D.C. the Canadian researcher decided to bet an American colleague that he could prove, once and for all, that the conventional wis­dom was right. Payment wagered that he and his colleagues at the University of Quebec's Armand Frappier Virology Research Center, who had a reputation for being tenacious virus-hunters, could demonstrate that a few stray viruses were nothing to worry about.

"We decided to find out what happens to people who drink water from a state-of-the-art plant meeting all U.S. and Cana­dian regulations, but which draws upon disease-contaminated source water," Payment recalls.

The experiment Payment devised went to the heart of a truth that people who drink treated water may not want to think about: Hundreds of U.S. and Canadian water plants routinely produce tap water from water that contains, at least in part, pathogens and micro-organisms from sewage. American rivers slake the thirst of, and serve as sewers for, an enormous population.

"I used to live in Bozeman, Montana", says microbiologist Mark LeChevallier, who works for the American Water Works Service Company near St. Louis. "The water they get here on the Mississippi is the water they've flushed in Montana six months ago."

Actually it takes the water slightly less than ONE month to make the journey from Montana sewage plants all the way down the Missouri to St. Louis. By then the river is loaded with bac­teria and discarded viruses from hundreds of upstream sewers, animal feedlots and slaughterhouses. St. Louis treats that water in drinking-water plants, uses it, treats it again in sewage plants, and puts it back in the Mississippi. Ten days later and a thou­sand miles downstream, they're drinking it in New Orleans.

Yet those in the clean-water business, such as LeChevallier, offer a reassuring message. "We believe that our water in the United States is well treated and safe to drink. ... Today people don't really have to think when they turn on the tap."

All Pierre Payment set out to do was prove that this common premise was true. He says he began his million-dollar experi­ment sure that "there were so few viruses in tap water that we could show water was causing no disease. What we found was the reverse."

Payment didn't have far to look to find a dirty river. Practi­cally in his back yard was a plant that treats Des Prairies River water and pipes it to 40,000 people in one part of suburban Montreal. What made the river ideal was that Payment already knew there were viruses in it--anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the Des Prairies flow consisted of untreated sewage. Yet no records existed that showed that Montrealers suffered an unusual amount of sewage-linked disease--the mysterious bouts of diar­rhea and 24-hour "bugs" that strike most households once a year or so. The neighborhood's tap water was locally considered of good quality and regularly met government standards similar to those that govern U.S. water.

Payment designed perhaps the most thorough study of tap water drinkers ever conducted, putting 2,400 people in suburban Montreal under close scrutiny. To tease out useful data, he fit­ted half of the test families kitchens with extremely efficient $800 under-the-sink reverse-osmosis filters. The filters were so selective that they passed no viruses or bacteria, enabling Payment to compare the health of families drinking and cooking with purified water with a control group that took water from the tap--from the treated water of the Des Prairies River.

Payment expected a tiny difference at best. The state-of-the-art tap water plant used chlorine, ozone and a variety of filters to kill bacteria and viruses. To produce telling statistics, he'd have to let the experiment run for 18 months. No one had stud­ied such a large group of water drinkers for that long. It was a costly and difficult gamble.

The telltale illness Payment was looking for--gastroenteritis-­is a good indicator of tap water's overall infection potential be­cause any of dozens of different bacteria and viruses cause its symptoms: vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, cramps. Gastroenteritis is also important because researchers are linking one of its causes--the extremely hardy enteroviruses--to far more serious illnesses. (See chapter 27, "More Than Just 'Stomach Flu".) One of the implicated enteroviruses, the Coxsackie virus, is associated with a devastating form of heart-muscle deterioration. Researchers are homing in on other enteroviruses that may be linked to diabetes, meningitis and problems during pregnancy. Payment's focus, however, was on the much more common and easy-to-measure incidence of short-term gastroenteritis.

To get the data, Payment's group decided on a tedious mix of biweekly phone checks and ongoing health questionnaires. The results of the phone calls were startling. "Almost from the first month, we started noticing the trend," says Payment. "Across every age group, sex and region, people who drank tap water without the filter were getting sick more often (than the drinkers of the filtered water)."

The experiment was detailed in the June 1991 American Journal of Public Health. The control group of Montrealers drinking unfiltered tap water had a 30 to 35 percent greater chance of getting gastroenteritis compared with those who drink highly filtered tap water. Something in the water was making the control group sick--but the use of sophisticated filters sig­nificantly reduced the incidence of such illnesses. The filter re­duced adult gastroenteritis by two cases per 10 adults per year. Children under 5 had even greater reductions; four to eight fewer sicknesses yearly per 10 children.

The dramatic reductions among the filtered-water drinkers would have been even greater if 5 percent hadn't contracted gastroenteritis from, oddly enough, the filters themselves (see chapter 27, "A Filter that Breeds Bacteria").

One dismaying conclusion from the results is that this small, well-maintained plant may represent the tip of a microbiological iceberg. After all, in one small community in 1988-89, that sin­gle water plant had spread some 8,000 cases of short-term dis­ease--and, apart from a dogged virology team, no one noticed. How much more disease may remain yet to be measured is any epidemiologist's guess, since U.S. government agencies haven't yet conducted a similar study here. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, says drinking water must be so free of bacteria and viruses that no more than one con­sumer in 10,000 will be sickened per year. [H: In a place like Golden Hills there should be "o", zero--none. And, no more than one in all of Greater Tehachapi.] Payment's experiment shows that not one but 2,000 consumers are being sickened by something so preventable that certain under-sink filters can knock it out.

It's not hard to find a reason why the effect has thus far re­mained undiscovered: The illness is relatively mild, and its nor­mal incidence per family is relatively small, about one extra case of gastroenteritis per Montreal family every 15 months. [H: Don't lose focus for this virologist is speaking of "regular" strains of viruses or bacteria--NOT what is pur­posely in water systems in the local area, for instance. You can know this because one of the "symptoms" mentioned in the paper releases, lists "jaundice" and that comes only from some type of liver involvement--not simple gastroenteritis.]

That may not sound like much--a miserable day in bed now and again for one family member or his or her neighbor--but if Payment's results hold true in the United States, tap water may, amazingly, turn out to cause at least as much gastroenteritis as is caused by bad food. That's a remarkable rethinking of the sources of staggering amounts of American "stomach flu"--es­pecially in a decade which has seen foodborne-disease outbreaks linked to raw eggs, chicken, soft cheeses, cantaloupe and seafood.

Payment's experiment revealed the opposite of classic "outbreak" epidemic, with many people succumbing within a short period of time. Instead, water-drinkers may have come to accept occasional gastroenteritis as "normal".

"If you take the data we have, it isn't an epidemic. In fact, the disease maintains a sub epidemic level.... We might, as a society, now accept as normal a large chunk of gastrointestinal sicknesses which may be preventable."

If the Montreal sub epidemic is projected across the U.S. population, the tally mounts to millions, if not tens of millions, of excess gastrointestinal bouts, with an economic cost of sev­eral billion dollars. And if scientists find that U.S. water plants are also passing on excess gastroenteritis--even though their tap water may meet recently revised EPA standards--a major re­evaluation may be in order.

Most probably, the preventable illnesses that Payment mea­sured were caused by viruses. Payment had found viruses in Quebec municipal tap water before, roughly one human virus in each liter of raw Des Prairies River water. Were the viruses present in Montreal, but in numbers so low that they were not detectable?

"I sat down and thought," recalls Payment. "If the plant produced water with just one virus per 1,000 liters, the number of resulting diseases would be very close to what we saw in our study. And we can't accurately measure those few viruses. Ev­ery time I detect one, there might really be 10, or 100, unde­tected.

"And even if you only have one virus in 1,000 liters, that means that one person will be infected per 1,000 per day. That's why we've been trying to get that last virus."

That last single virus is enough to infect an individual; its public health importance is far greater than killing say, every last bacterium. That's because it can take hundreds or thou­sands of, say, salmonella bacteria to cause infection, but even single viruses--more efficient in causing disease than bacteria--can infect a human. A few viruses, then, can cause sickness in water supplies out of all proportion to their numbers.

"I think the potential is large for a viral cause," says Dennis Juranek, chief of epidemiology at the parasitic disease branch of Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. "In over half of the outbreaks investigated, no [causal] agent is ever identified."

There has been no shortage of water-related illnesses to sur­vey in the United States: From 1971 to 1985 there were 485 clusters of disease so widespread that the CDC has classified them as "outbreaks"--each averaging 7,400 cases of disease. The outbreaks happened at diverse sites, from contaminated wells to city water systems, but nearly everyone in the field agrees that those numbers represent just a fraction of 1 percent of the true number of waterborne infections.

But to say that viruses may be the cause and that water-treat­ment methods may be to blame is not to say that proving Pay­ment's theory will be easy. "Virtually nobody has the lab capa­bility and resources to do [necessary] large-scale investigations for viruses," Juranek explains.

Water scientists are at a loss to explain how state-of-the-art treatment plants like the one in suburban Montreal could pass on so much illness. A visit to most North American municipal plants--from which 83 percent of Americans get their water--is reassuring to a casual observer. Sparkling-clean water passes through mazes of increasingly cleaner channels; the sharp and satisfying antiseptic smell of chlorine permeates the air. Whirring pumps, white-coated technicians, authoritative banks of gauges--it's a perfect setting for a Mr. Clean commercial. As river water gets chlorinated, sedimentated, inoculated, coagu­lated, filtered and ozonated, might an occasional virus be able to get through?

[H: Indeed, indeed. The virus now under point is one which is NOT KILLED OR TOTALLY FILTERED BY ANY KNOWN OPERATING SYSTEM TO 100%. THE VIRUS IN POINT HAS A COVERING "SHELL" WHICH IS NOT PENETRATED BY AVERAGE "SAFE" AMOUNTS OF CHLORINE (REMEMBER THAT CHLORINE IS A DEADLY POISON). THE VIRUS, LIKE THE HIV VIRUS, MOVES RIGHT THROUGH ALMOST ALL SAVE THE MOST INTACT MEMBRANE FILTERS JUST AS THE HIV PASSES EASILY THROUGH A CONDOM. MORE­OVER, THE HIV IS SECURE, ALSO, IN ANY SYSTEM OF PUBLIC WATER CLEANSING APPARATUS NOW IN USE. YOU MUST UNDERSTAND, THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY HAS NOW "CREATED" VIRUSES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES AND DEFENSES. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN TELL YOU THAT ALMOST 100% OF YOU WILL TEST HIV POSITIVE BY THE TURN OF THE CENTURY! IT IS A SURE THING--NOT JUST SPECU­LATION.]
PJ 54
CHAPTER 26
REC #2 HATONN

MON., SEP. 14, 1992 10:39 A.M. YEAR 6, DAY 29

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1992

CONTINUATION: FEAR OF FAUCETS

VIRUSES VS. BACTERIA
Viruses do, after all, have distinct advantages over bacteria because of their tiny size and durability. If a bacterium were, say, the size of a football field, a typical virus would be only the size of a football. The ordinary sand filters that most wa­ter-treatment plants use reliably stop larger bacteria, but as many as 5 percent of the viruses pass right through. To truly reduce viral numbers, the EPA requires water companies to use a multiple-step process.

The EPA rules tell the nation's 54,000 water suppliers they should reduce the number of viruses to no more than 1/10,000 of the source waters' original concentration. It's a curious mandate--local plants must precisely reduce the numbers of something they never actually measure. [Editor's note: Go back and read that last statement again. This is what science and engineering have deteriorated to and why I--Ed Young--have gotten out of it to hopefully do some good through this newspaper.] The EPA's 1989 Surface Water Treatment Rule exempts plants from having to test or count viruses in any way. Instead, plant operators spend $75 million yearly assiduously counting an old standby bacterium called coliform, in larger systems sometimes hourly. The problem is, coliform bacteria are next-to-useless indicators of waterborne viruses.

The theory has long been that although fecal coliform bacte­ria usually don't cause disease, they often show up when dis­ease-causing sewage bacteria has leaked into water. So utilities dump chlorine into the input water and the coliforms vanish. By doing so, utilities meet the EPA's microbe-destroying requirement. Day in and day out, bored water technicians keep testing chlorinated water to find fecal coliform. What about viruses? From New Orleans to Newark no water company technician tests for them, so there is no record of any "problems".

SHABBY REGULATIONS AND PHONY ARITHMETIC
LEAVE WATER IMPURE
To meet the letter of the law--1/10,000 the virus numbers originally in the source water--EPA rules allow water utilities to choose from a sampler of technologies which--on paper--should reduce virus numbers adequately. Filter your water, the EPA says, and they'll credit utilities with reducing viruses a 100-fold. Disinfect the water and we'll assume water viruses are reduced another 100-fold. Multiply these two reductions together and, voila, utilities can claim they've reduced viruses by 10,000 times--a mathematically-derived 99.00 percent reduction. And no technician ever need raise a test-tube to be sure the system's working.

Of course, the dirtier the source, the more trouble treatment plants have producing uncontaminated drinking water, but right now the EPA doesn't require cities using even the filthiest river water to add extra disinfectant or filtration--in fact, no more is required of those cities' plants than from, say, mountain springs.

"We recognize that the minimum required under the rule would probably not be adequate for systems with heavy fecal contamination," says Stig Regli, regulation manager at the EPA's Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water. "One thing that we're considering at the EPA is developing an eventual amendment to the Surface Water Treatment Rule which would require higher levels of total treatment with poor quality source water."

The smart money says that it won't be earlier than the mid-1990s before the EPA's ponderous process of hearings, re­hearings and legal paperwork can fix the present law--if the next administration makes it a priority.

California water supplies, on the whole, are far less polluted with human waste than many U.S. rivers. San Francisco, with its aqueduct drawing from the Sierra's Hetch Hetchy reservoir, faces negligible human waste disinfection problems. On the other hand, many cities along the Sacramento and San Joaquin River systems--like Fresno, Sacramento and Redding--dump their treated waste into waters that eventually wind up in the delta. From Contra Costa County to Southern California (via the State Water Project) a maze of local water plants depend upon theoretical estimates of the effectiveness of filtering viruses out of that delta water.

"In the literature, people have written that water plants should reduce viruses (to 1 billionth of the original number)," notes Payment. "So you should have no viruses left. That is theoretical. In practice, the filtration plant is imperfect."

Payment knows this firsthand because, in the jargon of re­searchers, he's done the wet work. In 1985, he found seven Quebec water-treatment plants passing about one virus per every 1,000 liters of treated drinking water. Some tap-water samples had not one, but 10 to 20 viruses.

Jack DeMarco, superintendent of the Water Quality and Re­search Division for Cincinnati's Water Works, says that smaller systems may inevitably fail to follow rigorous technical stan­dards in caring for sand filters. "Sometimes," he says, "small systems mis-operate by improper cleaning."

One seemingly obvious solution is simply to kill viruses by pouring in still more disinfectants like chlorine. But when chlorine is added to raw water containing organic matter, it forms tiny amounts of a familyof potentially cancer-causing by-products. Utilities and the EPA won't permit still-higher chlorine concentrations. Utilities that hope to counteract viruses in their source water must begin thinking of novel--and some­times-experimental--disinfection technologies. Cost of these new technologies varies, but in general it's just a few percent of the billions of dollars cities spend to operate waterworks.

And it's not as if river water has been getting filthier and filthier. Mississippi water, for example, has far fewer of those indicator-bacteria, fecal coliform, than years ago, thanks largely to the 1974 Clean Water Act, which forced U.S. cities to treat their sewage before discharging it into rivers and lakes. What is new is virologists' awareness that sewage treatment plants aren't nearly as good at virus killing as once believed.

"What I find the most difficult about sewage," says Betty Ol­son, a professor and chair of Environmental Analysis and Design at the University of California at Irvine, "is that a few studies were done back in 1974 and showed there were no viruses in [sewage plant] secondary effluent--and the EPA put the matter to rest. Now we have tests that are five times more sensitive than they had--and yet we have blinders on which don't encourage us to test for viruses today.

Before any war against viruses can be launched, water scien­tists insist the Montreal experiment must be redone in other cities. The new experiments are necessary to resolve several criticisms of Payment's study, particularly that the Montreal source water--which contains untreated sewage--was much more contaminated than U.S. water.

But was the Quebec River water that much dirtier than U.S. water? The numbers say NO. There were 57,000 col­iforms/liter in Montreal, but 44,000 last year in Cincinnati, and 30,000 to 50,000 just above New Orleans. Montreal's water is dirty, all right, but not much dirtier than thousands of miles of U.S. rivers. "Clearly, I think the virus and coliform in Mon­treal [rivers] are probably something you could find in Missouri and Mississippi and some of our larger waterways," agrees Joan Rose, a virologist in the University of South Florida.

Back at the Institute of Virology in Montreal, Pierre Payment is planning the decisive experiment. He would measure ill­nesses in two matched cities, one with high numbers of viruses known to be in river water, the other with few or no viruses. If he can show that there is the same incidence of disease in both cities, then the problem is not caused by viruses. "Right now," he says ruefully, "I'm trying to get the money to do the study."

"I think we have to validate the research that Payment has produced," says Alfred Dufour, director of the EPA's Microbi­ology Research Division in Cincinnati. "If it's repeated, with similar results, then I think we have to be concerned that there's something in our treatment process that isn't catching these pathogens, whatever they are."

Defour's group at the EPA's Environmental Monitoring Sys­tems Laboratory in Cincinnati may be the first to reproduce Payment's experiments, if it can cobble together enough money from various agencies. It may be 1994 before an experiment is under way and the slow pace of the EPA research irritates some in the research community.

"The EPA has tables of research on toxics, on pesticides, but right now, we have just one table on coliforms, which tells us nothing about what harmful organisms are in water and what the risk is," says Rose, who blames poor support for research from the Reagan and Bush administration. Under Reagan the EPA cited cost when it dropped out from funding half of Payment's Montreal experiment.

"The EPA has a water-research budget for water", says Betty Olson of UC Irvine. "They put $775,000 into protozoa, viruses and bacteria--and $20 MILLION into chemicals. We may be spending millions of dollars going after mice and letting the ele­phants get through."

Privately, scientists who study drinking water are aghast at the poverty of funds for water research--the United States still hasn't been able to fund $1 million to repeat Payment's ex­periment--and wealth of private spending for household water systems. Each year, they point out, private citizens spend $640 million for in-home water treatment--fully a third more than the EPA' entire national drinking water budget.

Since Payment published his research--focusing late-20th­century science on 19th century water-treatment technology--a few water engineers have begun wondering how to redesign plants, a few epidemiologists have started to talk about follow-up studies, and a few Washington regulators are beginning to pay more attention to viruses. "Certainly a study like Payment's is eye-opening," sums up the EPA's Stig Regli. "There's a rev­olution going on with microbiological risk assessment right now. ... It's changing our perception of what may be in the water."

END OF QUOTING FEAR OF FAUCETS.

* * *
Good luck citizens--the plan is to have the world depopulated down to not more than 550 million people by the turn of the century. That comes from the Elite LIPS of one George Bush of the New World Order. Indeed, good luck--most of you will be quite DEAD by the time the government acts--for they are the ones who have done it TO YOU.

Please stay tuned and read the next articles relative to this subject--and by the way, do have a good day, IF you live through it.