Good afternoon.
1) The public assumes your regulations are based in science, not supposition.[1]
2) I believe regulations must be a last resort and fashioned using facts, not fables.[2]
a) Erin Brockovich is a Hollywood movie, a fable, not a factual documentary. [3]
i) Masry & Vittitoe’s law clerk, Erin Brockovich sued the sockets off PG&E via the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.[4]
(a) By sheer chance, people with specific diseases can be found clustered near one another.[5]
3) Chromium-6 is a natural substance; it can be found in rocks, volcanic dust, and soil.[6]
a) This means it will be found naturally in water and the food we eat.[7]
4) Your white paper asserts that ingesting chromium-6 at a Maximum Contaminant Level of 10 parts per billion is so toxic at that level that the associated cancer risk is 1 in 2,000.[8]
5) Chromium-6 is equivalent in its reference dose[9] (RfD) with a natural insecticide.
a) caffeine.[10]
b) I do not mean to say that caffeine or chromium-6 do not have levels at which they are toxic.
i) They do.[11]
(1) Every substance no matter how benign, has a level at which it is toxic; and every substance no matter how toxic, has a level at which it is benign.[12]
c) Since caffeine is like chromium-6 in its toxicity, what does the proposed MCL look like if applied to a beverage, like Coca-Cola?
i) A toddler would be allowed 1/50th of a milliliter (1/3 drop) of Coca-Cola per day.[13]
(1) Any more than that would exceed the proposed MCL of 10 parts per billion.
d) Under the current federal MCL of 100 ppb: 1/5th ml (3 drops) of Coca-Cola is allowed per day.[14]
i) Lo siento, but I have a hard time swallowing an assertion that 4 drops of Coca-Cola per day will damage a toddler! [15] [16] [17] [18]
(1) Rather than assert, you should be able to show that your current 50 ppb MCL has produced benefits above the federal standard of 100 ppb such as fewer deaths and lowered cancer rates.[19] [20]
6) Last point: mandates are not magic.[21]
a) They are the use of government force to create a societal change.[22]
i) Your proposed regulation will criminalize and punish people doing something that had previously been legal.
b) If the water board passes this new regulation, it will accomplish three things:
i) 1. Create more criminals.[23]
ii) 2. Make people pay more for water.
iii) 3. Make more public water systems provide drinking water in plastic bottles that meet the federal standard for chromium 6.[24]
7) This proposed regulation is based on virtue-signaling politics, not science[25].
8) The federal law is bad. This proposed law is a magnitude worse.[26]
I thank the Water Board for taking my statement.
[1] For example, when chromium 6 exceeded the Maximum Contaminant Levels in the Coachella Valley Unified School District: High levels of chromium 6 shown in school’s well water “We have take [sic] action right away it inched up from 10 parts-per-billion (ppb) to 13 parts-per-billion,” said Dr. Darryl Adams, superintendent for the Coachella Valley Unified School District. http://www.kesq.com/news/high-levels-of-chromium-6-shown-in-schools-well-water/38795706 Remember, the toxicity of chromium-6 is much the same as the toxicity of caffeine. The amount of a caffeinated Coke (~ same as chromium-6 toxicity in Mg/Kg/Day) allowable at the 10 ppb MCL is about 2/3 of a drop. To say that one drop of Coca-Cola per day does harm is a result of moral panic politics, not science.
[2] I am dubious of their claims that they use science. “The progressives combined their extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise as a reliable, even necessary, guide to the public good. They were so sure of their own expertise as a necessary guide to the public good, so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America, that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms. Even more so, they failed to confront the reality that the experts—no less than the partisans, bosses, and industrialists they aimed to unseat—could have interests and biases of their own.” — Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era by Thomas C. Leonard
[3] “Scientific consensus does not believe Chromium-VI causes cancer after ingestion exposure from food or drinking water. On the other hand, inhalation of high levels of Chromium-VI can cause lung cancer, as demonstrated in occupational studies.” The Corruption of Chromium, https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/04/25/corruption-chromium-17014
[4] A form of confirmation bias where certain patterns or data are accepted but others are ignored. The name comes from a joke about a Texan who shoots at the side of a barn, then paints a around the tightest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.
[5] “Single toxins do not cause such a wide array of conditions.” California Repudiates Erin Brockovich on Hexavalent Chromium https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/08/02/california-repudiates-erin-brockovich-hexavalent-chromium-11644
[6] https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/chromium-drinking-water accessed Nov. 15, 2021
[7] “In long-term balance studies, Tipton has analyzed diets and excreta for 17 elements. His subjects were consuming three times as much chromium as was present in a hospital diet and much more than normal.
“Variations in average daily intake, however, are wide, from 5 μg well into the hundreds of micrograms. Foods vary considerably in chromium content. The largest sources are meats, mollusks and crustaceans, vegetables, and unrefined sugar. In general, fish, vegetable oils, and fruit have been reported to contain smaller amounts of chromium…” Chromium. National Academy of Sciences.
[8] Source https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinkingwater/docs/hc_treatmentcosts_healtheffects.pdf No listing of associated risks for CA’s current MCL of 50 ppb or the federal MCL of 100 ppb. One can only assume drinking one cup of coffee is a death sentence.
[9] . “The final RfD [reference dose for caffeine] would be 0.0025 mg/kg-day, a very small dose in the same range as RfDs for known toxicants such as hexavalent chromium and potassium cyanide.” Sorell TL. Approaches to the Development of Human Health Toxicity Values for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients in the Environment. AAPS J. 2016 Jan;18(1):92-101. doi: 10.1208/s12248-015-9818-5. Epub 2015 Sep 3. PMID: 26338232; PMCID: PMC4706294.
[10] Sorell TL. Approaches to the Development of Human Health Toxicity Values for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients in the Environment. AAPS J. 2016 Jan;18(1):92-101. doi: 10.1208/s12248-015-9818-5. Epub 2015 Sep 3. PMID: 26338232; PMCID: PMC4706294. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706294/
[11] The reason we don’t hear of people overdosing on caffeine from coffee is that it is excreted it before one can overdose on it. If one were to not excrete, one still would not die from the caffeine but rather from water intoxication. See: Jennifer Strange autopsy.
[12] e.g., water intoxication or water poisoning: hyponatremia, lower than normal concentration of sodium in the extracellular space. It is essentially drowning cells.
In early 2007, Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of 3, was found dead in her suburban Rancho Cordova home. After taking part in the “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest in which radio station KDND 107.9 promised a Nintendo Wii video game system to the person who could drink the most water without urinating, after a few hours of downing 8 ounces of water every 15 minutes she complained of dizziness and a headache. She soon gave up and vomited in the restroom. The coroner’s autopsy determined that Ms. Strange had died from water intoxication after drinking nearly two gallons of water. Consumption of too much water disrupts the body’s salt balance, (known as hyponatremia, which causes cells to swell. This ultimately causes the brain to swell, resulting in seizures, respiratory distress, and then very likely death.
[13] Assuming my assumptions are correct, (feel free to check my math) a 10 ppb for a 10 kg child would be the same as the reference dose of 0.0025 mg/kg-day. 12 oz of Coca Cola has 35 mg of caffeine.
[14] “[T]he RfD process [on which the EPA bases its MCL] is still very conservative and results in doses that may be many times below actual levels of concern. Conservatism is useful in screening and for ensuring protectiveness, but can present a challenge in risk management. In some cases, conservatively derived concentrations may be overprotective, resulting concentrations that are difficult or expensive to detect analytically, cannot be environmentally achieved, are based on intakes well below typical or voluntary exposures, or are otherwise unreasonably low.” Sorell TL. Approaches to the Development of Human Health Toxicity Values for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients in the Environment. AAPS J. 2016 Jan;18(1):92-101. doi: 10.1208/s12248-015-9818-5. Epub 2015 Sep 3. PMID: 26338232; PMCID: PMC4706294. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706294/
[15] or water with chromium-6 which has the same toxicity.
[16] “[T]he whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
[17] Given the equal toxicity of chromium and caffeine, an adult (weighing about 8-10 times more than a toddler) ordering a Starbucks “grande” (16 oz) would be allowed to drink 0.02 milliliters (1/3 drop) from the cup per day at the proposed MCL for chromium-6.
[18] One Starbucks medium roast grande and your dead! A Starbucks 12 oz (“tall”) Pike Place (medium roast) has about 235 mg of caffeine, e.g., similar in toxicity to 235 mg of chromium-6. There are journal articles indicating stomach cancer is less prevalent in non-caffeine (and no alcohol) drinking Mormons when compared to the U.S. population. Cancer Incidence in Mormons and Non-Mormons in Utah, 1966–1970 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197601152940303 Lyon, J.L., Gardner, K. & Gress, R.E. Cancer incidence among Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah (United States) 1971–85. Cancer Causes Control 5, 149–156 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01830261 Classics in oncology: Cancer incidence in Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah, 1966-1970 https://doi.org/10.3322/canjclin.33.5.309
[19] The Hexavalent Chromium MCL Economic Feasibility Analysis mentions “cancer” 7 times. At no time does it put any number on cases or deaths averted due to the Board’s MCL. What it does say and then proceeds to not prove, “[T]he MCL set by the State Water Board will be through a policy decision that considers traditional concepts such as treatment costs and number of cancer cases averted, as well as the costs and benefits of the regulation…”
[20] Meanwhile, according to the American Cancer Society in 2023, “In the US, the number of new cases of stomach cancer has been dropping by about 1.5% each year over the last 10 years.” In part “due to a decreasing prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection associated with improved hygiene and overall improvements in diet and food storage practices.”
[21] “The post-liberal temptation is to believe that government power can be a substitute for the hard labor of institution building and cultural change. It isn’t. The solution must begin at home—on the front porch, around the kitchen table, and in the mirror. The law is not a magic wand. There are no magic wands, and there is no shortcut to the good society.’ Slade, S. Is There a Future for Fusionism? https://reason.com/2021/02/10/is-there-a-future-for-fusionism/
[22] “Every government law, or regulation is a demand that someone do what he doesn’t want to do, refrain from doing what he does want to do, or pay for something he doesn’t want to pay for, and those demands are backed up by police with guns.” – Harry Browne
[23] If a water provider produces water that is not in compliance, it has broken the law: this is a criminal act.
[24] “Coyote Valley Elementary School is continuing to distribute bottled water to students and staff more than a week after administrators told students not to drink tap water due to contamination concerns.” http://www.record-bee.com/article/NQ/20160322/NEWS/160329992
[25] “Science is an open-ended, decentralized, self–regulating, competitive public process for legitimizing belief. The process allows no higher appeal than that of each to each; there is always another hypothesis; another test of the assumptions of the belief.” Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, pg 57
[26] The public will believe that 1/100,000,000,000 of a gram of CR(VI) will harm them if the water tests at 11ppm and not 10ppm. See: http://www.record-bee.com/article/NQ/20160322/NEWS/160329992 This is not how toxicology works. A reference dose is magnitudes lower than the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL). There is a huge margin of safety.
“The reference dose (RfD) is an adaptation of the ADI used by the US EPA and serves as the principal risk assessment toxicity tool for evaluating toxic effects other than cancer and mutagenicity. The uncertainty factors (UFs) used by the US EPA in developing RfDs are 10-fold to extrapolate from a lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) to a NOAEL; 10-fold to extrapolate from animal to human data, 10-fold to extrapolate from subchronic to chronic results; and 10-fold to protect sensitive human populations (26). The RfD approach also provides for an additional modifying factor (MF) in addition to uncertainty factors to address the identified uncertainties and deficiencies in ADIs, such as failure to consider the shape of the dose-response curve, selection of the appropriate adverse endpoint, and the strength of the underlying study, particularly the number of exposed individuals. The US EPA also provides a confidence (high, medium, or low) the evaluators have in the RfD and its likelihood to prevail in the future (26). Despite a more rigorous review of the data compared to the ADI, the RfD process is still very conservative and results in doses that may be many times below actual levels of concern. Conservatism is useful in screening and for ensuring protectiveness, but can present a challenge in risk management. In some cases, conservatively derived concentrations may be overprotective, resulting concentrations that are difficult or expensive to detect analytically, cannot be environmentally achieved, are based on intakes well below typical or voluntary exposures, or are otherwise unreasonably low.” Source: Sorell, Tamara L, Approaches to the Development of Human Health Toxicity Values for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients in the Environment
Nullius in Verba 