Deadly Proteins Unstoppable In Biosolids, Reused Water
San Diego’s City Council approved plans to reuse sewage water into drinking water. It’s a growing trend that short-sells a proven health risk associated with deadly proteins.
In my opinion, San Diego joined a growing global movement in what could become a human health disaster. The move could be a death sentence for millions of people who will drink reclaimed wastewater. That same water will contaminate their homes, gardens and offices with a highly contagious and unstoppable pathogen called a prion–an infectious form of protein. The exposure can cause neurological disorders in mammals, including Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is spreading through food and water. Mismanaged sewage is part of the problem.
The project, dubbed Pure Water San Diego, is expected to provide more than a third of the city’s potable water by 2035. When Pure Water is built out in 20 years, it is should generate 83 million gallons a day of “clean” water.
The system starts with micro-filtration, where rows of plastic tubes and straws filter out microbes and other contaminants. The big stuff.
The water then goes through reverse-osmosis to screen out organic material, salts and other solids. But all pathogens still are essentially untreated.
The last step is a combination of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide to kill anything left. Pathogens resistant to UV light or hydrogen peroxide are destined for your tap.
As any surgeon worth his or her salt can tell you, UV light and hydrogen peroxide can kill many things if properly exposed, but they can’t kill a prion. In fact, there is not any known treatment in the world that is 100 percent effective against deadly prions in any environment, especially water. Hospitals safely discard surgical instruments used on patients with prion disease. Prions are more likely to migrate, mutate and multiply than be neutralized (they aren’t a virus or bacteria, so they can’t be killed).
The “treated” water from the proposed San Diego system could be mixed into the San Vicente Reservoir and piped to customers, or the city could route the water directly into the distribution system. Once exposed to deadly prions, the waterways will be contaminated forever–serving as incubators and distributors of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease.
Is it really safe to drink reclaimed human sewage? Not if you hope to avoid deadly neurological disorders. prions are unstoppable.
The Orange County water reclamation program was recently featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes. Reporter Lesley Stahl bravely drank a sample of treated sewage water during the story. As she explained, San Diego won’t be the first to drink its own sewage. A number of other cities around the world have already sold their souls down the river based on half-truths and misinformation. Orange County, for example, recycles 70 million gallons a day to potable. It’s expanding capacity to 100 million gallons per day.
The Problem With Prions and Prion Disease
If not for one tiny detail, I would be more open-minded and supportive of the practice of recycling wastewater. That microscopic detail is called a prion—the deadly and unstoppable protein behind the exploding Alzheimer’s epidemic, mad cow disease and other neurological disorders that are killing millions of people, wildlife and livestock around the world.
A new study confirms that people and animals dying of prion disease are contaminating the environment around them with a deadly and unstoppable protein found in their bodily fluids. Claudio Soto, PhD, professor of neurology and director of the George and Cynthia W. Mitchell Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Brain Related Illnesses at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, and his colleagues recently found prions in urine. The study has been published in the August 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The bad news is that prions in urine underscore the environmental nightmare associated with Alzheimer’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CJD), Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and prion diseases among livestock and wildlife. Although there are many causes for prion disease, many people and animals are contracting it from environmental exposure (food, water and soil) and then contaminating the environment even more with their own bodily fluids. Once victims die, carcasses also contaminate soil and water.
“This is the first time that prions have been detected in human urine,” Dr. Soto told Neurology Today.
Soto failed to reference urine and blood studies performed earlier by Ruth Gabizon in 2001 and Reichl in 2002. These studies also detected prions in bodily fluids. Despite that detail, Soto’s findings can help focus global attention on the exploding prion problem.
Barack Obama honors Dr. Stanley Prusiner for his research on prions and prion disease.
Dr. Stanley Prusiner earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for identifying, naming and studying deadly prions. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research.
In June 2012, Prusiner confirmed that Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and even ALS are prion diseases similar, if not identical, to CJD in people, mad cow disease in livestock and chronic wasting disease in wildlife. The variations in disease progression could be due to genetics in the patients or mutations in the prion, not different diseases entirely.
Additional research has determined that the prion pathogen spreads through feces, saliva, blood, milk, soil, water and the tissue of infected animals and humans. If a single person with prion disease discharges bodily fluids or feces into a public sewer system, that sewage system is permanently infected and the amount of contamination will multiply and intensify daily. Everything discharged from that sewage system—reclaimed water and biosolids—can spread the contamination even further.
Once a prion reaches the soil, that soil is permanently contaminated and the entire watershed below that point is at risk forever. If your food and water is generated in that watershed, you have a higher risk of contracting prion disease.
With the help of weather, prions can migrate through wind and water. Rain and snow can rinse them into surface water, groundwater, streams, ponds, lakes, and oceans. Wildlife, livestock and humans can ingest prions from soil, water and food. We can’t afford to take the risk of further contaminating entire watersheds – increasing the pathway to humans, livestock, and wildlife downstream.
Because of these factors and others, we have an epidemic of prion disease around the world right now. The epidemic is worse in some regions of the world than others. For example, the death rate for Alzheimer’s is higher in Finland than any other country in the world. Iceland and the United States are runners up. In fact, the death rate for Alzheimer’s is higher in Washington state than any other known region in the world. These vast discrepancies can only be explained by environmental factors, including food, water and air pathways. Sewage disposal that contaminates local food and water supplies is likely part of the problem.
The scientific name for prion disease is Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE). The operative word is “transmissible.” TSEs include Alzheimer’s, mad cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), chronic wasting, Huntington’s, scrapie and possibly Parkinson’s. This transmissible family of disease is unstoppable for many reasons. In addition, once items are exposed to victims of prion disease, they can never be sterilized again.
The urine and sewage connection helps explain why the global epidemic is exploding. More than 44 million people around the world are known to have these neurodegenerative diseases today. Millions more have the disease, but don’t know it, yet. In addition to these people, millions of infected people around the world have used our sewage systems over the past century. Millions more are using them today. It’s impossible to neutralize or stop prions in even the most sterile environments, including hospitals. It’s ludicrous to think that treated sewage water or biosolids are prion-free. Especially since prions from people are much more infectious than those found in other species (prions become more aggressive as they work their way up the food chain).
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has confirmed that prions are in sewage and that there has been no way to detect them or stop them. As such, the EPA has never issued guidance on prion management within sewage processing plants. This lack of directive allows budget-strapped states and counties to regulate the practices in a variety of ways that best suit local municipalities and industries.
Dr. Soto’s test changes that equation. Now, the EPA can’t plead ignorance to the dangers of prions in biosolids and reclaimed sewage water. Sewage dumped at sea must be reconsidered. Prions should be classified as a select agent again by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Center for Disease Control. Similar measures should be enacted around the world immediately. Failure to act responsibly is suicide.
Unfortunately, testing will confirm that every sewage system in the world has served people with Alzheimer’s disease and CJD. As such, prions have been incubating, multiplying and migrating out of these systems for many years. The problem is intensifying within and beyond these sewage systems every day.
According to the U.S. EPA, “Prions are extremely resistant to inactivation by ultraviolet light, irradiation, boiling, dry heat, formaline, freezing, drying and changes in pH. Methods for inactivating prions in infected tissues or wastes include incineration at very high temperatures and alkaline hydrolysis.” They didn’t mention hydrogen peroxide.
“Since it’s unlikely that the sewage treatment or pellet production processes can effectively deactivate prions, adopting measures to prevent the entry of prions into the sewer system is advisable,” said the Toronto Department of Health, November 2004.
The EPA National Water Research Compendium 2009-2014 lists prions eight times as an emerging contaminant of concern in sewage sludge (biosolids), water and manure.
The Sludge Rule Overrules The Golden Rule
The EPA issued what it calls the “Sludge Rule,” which basically disclaims any responsibility for its questionable risk assessments regarding biosolids. The EPA reserves the right to adjust these risk assessments, however, as the test of time disproves its pseudo-science.
Prion researcher Dr. Joel Pedersen, from the University of Wisconsin, found that prions become 680 times more infective in certain soils. Pedersen’s research also found that sewage treatment does not inactivate prions.
“Our results suggest that if prions enter municipal wastewater treatment systems, most of the agent would bond to sludge, survive anaerobic digestion, and be present in treated biosolids,” Pedersen said. “Land application of biosolids containing prions represents a route for their unintentional introduction into the environment. Our results emphasize the importance of keeping prions out of municipal wastewater treatment systems. Prions could end up in sewage treatment plants via slaughterhouses, hospitals, dental offices and mortuaries just to name a few of the pathways. The disposal of sludge represents the greatest risk of spreading prion contamination in the environment. Plus, we know that sewage sludge pathogens, pharmaceutical residue and chemical pollutants are taken up by plants and vegetables.”
Meanwhile, we’re spreading tons of biosolids (sewage sludge) on farmland every day to produce our food. Organic food operations, including fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy are not immune to prion exposure.
We’re dumping biosolids on parks and golf courses and our backyards where we live and play. Coastal cities and ocean vessels dump their sewage right into the ocean, where prions can enter the food chain again, while washing back on our favorite beaches.
We’re dumping millions of tons of contaminated sewage into the oceans, rivers and on cropland around the world every day. We’re spraying reclaimed wastewater on our parks, golf courses and crops. In some cases, people are drinking reclaimed wastewater that has been recycled to their taps. Municipalities, water companies and sewage districts face new liabilities as never seen before.
The new urine study primarily references what is called variant CJD (vCJD is the supposed strain of prion that causes mad cow disease). I argue that a deadly prion is a deadly prion and all prion diseases should be managed assuming that prions are in the urine of all victims. There is no species barrier. There is no cure. There is no reason to assume that prion diseases referred to as Alzheimer’s, CJD, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and others are different from each other.
Based on this premise, caregivers and family members must arm themselves with facts that can save their lives. Simple acts can expose family and caregivers to the prion contagion. For example, many household items, including utensils and dishes that belong to people who have Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s are likely infected from saliva. It’s unsafe for others to use these items and people should not donate them to charity.
Despite the mass confusion and concern regarding prion disease, protective and sterilization protocols for Alzheimer’s and CJD are not the same and millions of people are being exposed to prion disease because of false securities. CJD is just the tip of a deadly, incurable iceberg and we all should sit up and pay attention right now. We’re recklessly allowing caregivers and stakeholders to expose themselves and others to the problem.
Although there are multiple causes of, and pathways for, prion disease, reckless policies around the world are contributing to the unstoppable epidemic. It’s spreading further every day. Stakeholders must arm themselves with facts that can promote reform because all infected mammals shed infectious prions in their blood, saliva, mucus, urine and feces. Prions also have been found in milk. In essence, the entire body of a victim is contaminated and must be managed accordingly. That includes Alzheimer’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
https://www.academia.edu/9711886/Alzheimers_Disease_Fueled_By_Mismanaged_Sewage
