In West Virginia an Experiment With 300,000 Test Subjects

Well, folks can turn on the tap, fill up the ice trays, and get those showers flowing in southern West Virginia. Official have given the green light that the water from the Elk River is now safe to drink and bath in.

            While there might be something of a licorice smell to the water, utility officials say it was safe to drink. But if your one of the folks who live in and around Charleston, West Virginia, you may still want to wait a day or two before turning on the tap. Apparently, there is not much science behind the establishment of one-part-per-million safety threshold for this substance, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol. The level was established based on a single unpublished study in which this threshold amount killed 50 percent of test animals.

            So 50 percent of the test animals died, and officials say it’s OK to drink this water? To my thinking, these 300,000 West Virginians are now capitalist guinea pigs in a huge uncontrolled health experiment. If I lived there, I’d be buying bottled water for the next week, at least.

West Virginians need to ask "Is the glass half full of  4-methylcyclohexane methanol or half empty of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol?"

One of the questions that lingers, is how does such a large geographic area come to rely on a single source for its drinking water? Well, it turns out that the coal industry is to blame here as well. I’d like to see some more hard numbers on this, but according to Nora Caplan-Bricker at the New Republic, mountaintop mines have contaminated local water sources throughout the Mountain State’s southern and central regions, leaving residents no choice but to end the use of well water and pump in the water from the Elk River.