Don't laugh, you're drinking faeces water too.

Why we can't all have Clean Air or Clean Water: there are just no corporate profits or political powergrabs in ensuring clean water for everybody.

It’s among the weakest kinds of research paper. Not a randomised trial, but a meta-analysis of mostly epidemiologic studies. It could never confirm a cause-and-effect, but it did establish an association between chlorinated drinking water and a 15-33% increased rate of colon and bladder cancer. It’s not the first one to do so, just the latest.

Interesting. Scientists would say this is ‘hypothesis-generating’, tantalising but still needing to be confirmed by stronger case-control or ideally, randomised controlled trials. But those will likely not happen any time soon.

For now, this would be my take-home message from this study:

We have allowed our drinking water to get contaminated (by cow faeces, by human faeces, by ‘forever chemicals’ in flame retardants in our foams and plastics, and by a ton of pesticide and fertiliser runoff from intensive quick-profit agriculture.