And now for something completely different - in addition to the deadly Superbugs, sewage may contain even more difficult to get rid off and dangerous Prions, implicated in many diseases such as Alzheimers. Art Bickerton who is not on FB sent a URL to an alarming article and my response I just emailed him: Hi Art thanks for bringing this up, I have seen reports on prions in sewage before and completely forgot about them. Although there is much good information in this article, it is written clearly to fight the drinking water from sewage reclamation, I think a large part of it is political propaganda and the science takes a back seat again. For example, not all prions are created equal and it is not certain that prions cause Alzheimer’s, although there are come similarities. Since many of these diseases are supposedly caused by oligomers of certain proteins or protein fragments, it should in the future be possible to prevent formation of these oligomers and thus prevent the disease. Likewise, it may be possible to filter these oligomers out of drinking water because on their relatively large molecular weight. I am thinking of something like a dialysis membrane, so perhaps another step at the end of all those water reclamation steps could do the trick. I am sure it would add further cost, but it may remove these self-replicating oligomers or prions. dana.org/News/Details.aspx?id=43110 dana.org/News/Details.aspx?id=43089 sciencemag.org/content/313/5794/1781.short And it is obvious to me that again the only safe way to get rid of all those infectious agents including superbugs, viruses, chemicals, micro plastics, micro fibres is in a gasifier. And of course putting sludge on the land in any kind of form of biosolids is total insanity. Obviously, anaerobic digestion does absolutely nothing to destroy these prions and will also do nothing to destroy plasmids containing multi-drug resistance genes. tom On Jan 3, 2015, at 8:21 PM, Art Bickerton wrote: Many newspapers and scholarly articles are following this report. It is depressing - but it shows the need for the highest possible sewage treatment - hopefully they will find the answer soon. Art crossbowcommunications/san-diego-should-reconsider-plan-to-drink-recycled-wastewater/
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 21:33:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015