Measuring Pollution In Humans

CHaN_316 writes "Scientists have begun measuring pollutants in our body and the results sound like a chemical clean-up site. They've found things such as flame retardants, chemicals derived from DDTs, mercury, uranium, cotinine, and many more. The concern is a lot of this stuff is ending up in mother's milk. But hey, at least in the event of spontaneous combustion, I'll be partially protected."

Junkfood

[Anonymous Coward]

It all comes from junkfood

Re:Prevention? Antidote?

[Via_Patrino]

And take more showers :)

What I find most interesting is that morticians

[kfg]

report that bodies are taking up to 10% longer to decompose than they used to from all the BHA and BHT added to preserve freshness.

Live fast, eat a lot of antioxidant ladden potato chips, leave a durable, good looking (if somewhat corpulent) corpse.

Gives you more time for a clean dehydration as well, so you can make that trip to Orion in all your leathery splendor.

KFG

Hmm...

[CSZeus]

Better make sure they do some dihydrogen monoxide scanning too... most places don't even think about checking for that stuff. Do you know how many people die as a result of that stuff each year? It's ridiculous.

Bad idea

[ajs]

Measuring pollution in humans? Bad idea. I mean, imagine the confusion, "so bob, how's the weather today?"

"Well, it's not good. Three, maybe four humans and there's no wind to blow them out to sea."

"You sick, sick man...."

Re:Hmm...

[Slack3r78]

Yeah, we're practically drowning in the stuff. =P

Careful

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon, we will start mining each other.

Shhhhhhh!

[CodePyro]

Don't tell the terrorists that there might tbe uranium in their body...They might try to blow themselves up...ohh wait they do that anyways...

Re:Prevention? Antidote?

[niko9]

Drink more Water.

DONT DO THAT!
Your body is 98% water! You'll drown!

Measuring Pollution In Humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know there was a unit of measurment for pollution. Apparently it is the Human (Hm? Hu?)

Re:What I find most interesting is that morticians

[NickFitz]

What I find most interesting is that the morticians keep digging them up to check.

what a bunch of hooey!

[martin-boundary]

As somebody who claims to have followed the link, I feel decidedly nonplussed.

Don't you hate it when people writing articles make up their own units? Whoever heard of measuring pollution in "humans"? This is pure bunk. Most useful units are standardized and published by ISO [www.iso.ch], and "humans" sure aren't listed anywhere I can see. And anyway, what's the symbol going to be, "hm"?

Standardized units are essential when doing studies which claim repeatability. Anything less is simply not science. I shudder to think what useless arguments this will produce, when a swedish team checks their pollution readings in scandinavian humans, while an italian teams does the same in latin humans. At sufficiently high readings, the difference could be several percent! Then there are issues of hair colour and hair style, which could even change the results of the experiment years after the fact! And don't get me started on the problems every time bell bottoms get back into fashion.

If you ask me, shoddy science begins with the wrong units. And humans are definitely the wrong unit to use in this case.

Re:Prevention? Antidote?

[jc42]

This might be an opportune time to mention the campaign to Do Something about the growing danger posed by dihydrogen monoxide [dhmo.org] in the environment and in our very bodies.

One of my favorite bits is the reference to "award-winning U.S. scientist Nathan Zohner" who showed that "scientist Nathan Zohner concluded that roughly 86 percent of the population supports a ban on dihydrogen monoxide." This is true [snopes.com].

If you're a /. reader, you should be familiar with this story.

Re:Prevention? Antidote?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it ever an opportune time to resurrect an Internet meme that even pre-dates the All Your Base nonsense? You might as well include a link to the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. project, or an "Ate My Balls" site.

Re:you can overdose on water

[ChickenAintDone]

you can overdose on water

Isn't that called drowning?

Re:Prevention? Antidote?

[Tackhead]

> Except for the fact that our water is now laden with all sort of pharmaceutical enhancements, which often makes its way through wastewater treatment systems. If enough people keep taking Viagra and Prozac, we'll all be walking around with smiles on our faces and woodies down below...

And how, precisely, is this a problem?

Oh wait. The women, too, you mean. Eew.