Pesticides in drinking water: Atrazine
On this web page you can see how many carcinogen molecules you ingest on a normal day by drinking two liters of water with only 1 ppb (parts per billion) of Atrazine.
1 ppb (by mass) of Atrazine means 10-9 kg of Atrazine for 1 kg of water. The number of moles of Atrazine can be calculated with formula (1):
The number of molecules in a certain quantity of matter can be calculated with formula (2)
The combination of equation (1) with equation (2) gives (3):
The mass of Atrazine present in one liter of water with 1 ppb of Atrazine is 10-9·103 g.
The French limit for Atrazine in drink water is 0,2 ppb this comes over with 5,58·1014 molecules in one liter. Imagine that you drink 2 liter of this water a day, it means that you ingest 1,1·1015 molecules of this pesticide every day. Experimentation in labs on animals shows that Atrazine is carcinogen. Direct experimentation on human beans is not done but there are several epidemiological studies that conclude that Atrazine is carcinogen. For further information take a look at the websites mentioned bellow: http://epa.gov/scipoly/sap/meetings/2003/july/atrazine.pdf http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/28/5/836.pdf http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/28/5/836 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15367570&dopt=Abstract |
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