Your water is going to kill you!!!!!

This may hit the mainstream news – or it may not. Who can tell what's going to catch fire in the news?

UK researchers who conducted the first UK study, and the largest yet, of possible links between exposure to chlorination by-products have concluded that their data "suggest a significant association of stillbirths with maternal residence in high TTHM [total trihalomethanes] exposure areas."

From the actual report, we have:

Allowing for this heterogeneity using a random-effects model to obtain overall summary estimates of the TTHM effects, small excess risks [in terms of odds ratio – ed] were found in the high compared to low exposure areas for stillbirths, low, and very low birth weight of 11 percent (95 percent CI: 0, 23 percent), 9 percent (95 percent CI: -7, 27 percent) and 5 percent (95 percent CI: -18, 34 percent) respectively, with intermediate risks in the medium exposure areas (Table 2). Only results for stillbirths were statistically significant.

And the one result that is statistically significant is just barely so.

It should be noted that the incidence of stillbirth is about 0.53%; of low birth weight, 6.32%; of very low birth weight, 0.99%. The middle-of-the-road increase in risk is pretty small.

Stillbirth rates increase by 0.07%, low birth weight rates increase by 0.57%, and very low birth weight rates increase by 0.05%. (Percentage points, that is.)

We can remove THMs from water, for a price. The question that always has to be addressed when dealing with issues like this is, can we get more bang for the buck elsewhere? If so, we're better off spending it there.