Plastic Bottle Death Shocker!

Great news! I've just heard about a new way that we might suddenly shuffle off our mortal coil, especially if you happen to be a girl and you happen to have boobies. Yes, I said boobies. I suppose that could potentially affect certain males as well, but that's a separate issue. I'm don't think anyone has ever died of moobs.

OK, this one involves plastic water bottles. It has nothing to do with being hit by them at high velocity, swallowing them whole, sitting on them (*!?$), or even any long term environmental affects caused by producing them, no this one is about drinking from them. Yes, the very purpose that they were, well ya know, created for.

Truth be told, I've actually heard this one before. I worked in the chemical industry for a time making plasticy things, so I got to hear about it, but anyway, I mentioned this to my grandmother once and she developed a suspicious fear of plastic bottles that probably stayed with her for the rest of her days, so let's just be careful how we use this information.

The problem is - at least as I understand it from my stint as a lab monkey and the sketchy details I got from the alarmist email I received this morning - that plastic bottles leach a sort of chemical called 'dioxin' into the water stored in them, particularly when they are kept at higher temperatures, such as in a car.

Dioxin it seems is a toxic substance that has been found to have links with breast cancer. According the email, Sheryl Crow (the singer) was told by her oncologist that women should not drink from plastic water bottles that had been stored in the car. The email also said that Sheryl Crow had told Ellen (DeGeneres I presume?) that this had caused her breast cancer! Shocking news indeed. A medical revelation one might even say!

Now I'm no medical expert, but I fairly sure that identifying a substance found in cancerous breast tissue as being the same as a substance found in bottled water is NOT the same thing as identifying a link between the two, and certainly not grounds for claiming a causal relationship. But in this case I'll forgive the lovely Miss Crow (who probably didn't say that anyway) because she is after all the victim in all this.

What cannot be forgiven is the ridiculous alarmist emails that are threatening us with death, just from drinking the very substance that keeps us alive! Where are the facts for pity's sake!? What level of toxin is leached into water, over what period of time? What levels of dioxin are actually dangerous to humans anyway?

At one point the email stated "Bottled water in your car is very dangerous!". It didn't say "...potentially risky" or "...possibly unwise" or even "...tastes like piss because it's warm!", no no, it is VERY dangerous. OK then, a challenge to whoever wrote that tosh in the first place. You and I sit in a hot car for two days with nothing but plastic bottles of waters. Let's see who dies first sucker!