Bull Run: Portland tested 750 samples of Bull Run water last year for the potentially lethal parasite cryptosporidium in Oregon's largest source of drinking water. The City That Drinks sampled 3,500 gallons over 12 months from the reservoirs' intakes and potential hot spots in their tributaries. It found a grand total of zero. The result is the city's strongest argument yet against an Environmental Protection Agency requirement that it build a $100 million treatment plant by 2014 to kill the chlorine-resistant parasite in the name of public health. Portland's Water Bureau will use the data -- the most rigorous testing for cryptosporidium in the nation, the bureau says -- to request a variance from the federal rule later this year. Right...Cryptosporidium is a bacteria. Bacteria rule the earth. They are everywhere. New research finds that the human body is more a colony than an individual organism. Nintey percent of you and I is composed of bacteria; the rest is a co-existing colony of actual human cells. Another branch of research on the old Tree of Knowledge finds that residents of industrialized natrions - America in particular - in their obsessive pursuit of cleanliness have robbed their bodies and their environment of many of the essential beneficial bacteria. At the same time, by the same means we are weakening our own immune systems - and those of the environment as well. We are not well, in a word. What ever there is in Bull Run water besides water is not the question we should be asking. We should really be looking behind the screen and find out which corporate lobbyists have contaminated the EPA. Because believe me when I say, the Environmental Protection Agency does not care about your health and well-being. If it did, it would occupy itself with the task of banning pesticides, herbicides and the chemical cornucopia that is ubiquitous in the world around us. But that would be fighting the same corporate Goliaths to which the EPA is beholden. In the end, the EPA wants to exercise some degree of institutional control over this water of ours because the future belongs to whoever controls our dwindling supplies of water. It's just business is all...
- KBOO