Word: tapping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...store. Shoppers have been told that the produce is peppered with pesticides, the boxes and cans packed with treacherous additives, the meat stuffed with powerful drugs, the chickens spattered with bacteria, and the fish steeped in chemical wastes. Even the cool, clear water that comes out of every kitchen tap is suspected of being a witch's brew laced with lead, microorganisms and industrial pollutants. To many people, eating and drinking have become death-defying feats. No wonder sales of "organic" foods and bottled waters have surged to new heights...
...there are a few worrisome exceptions. Radon, a radioactive gas that gets into the air from soil and rocks, is also present in some water supplies. Rick Cothern, a member of the EPA's Science Advisory Board, points out that when the contaminated water pours out of a tap or shower head, the radon can pass into the air inside a home. He believes that radon from water may cause a few hundred cases of cancer each year. Those cases might be prevented if municipalities or homeowners installed equipment designed to aerate water -- and thus remove radon -- before it enters...
...their water tested for lead by a certified lab. If the level is too high, they can investigate ways to deal with the problem or switch to bottled water for drinking and cooking. Even then, caution is called for: some bottled waters contain many of the same contaminants that tap water does. The only way to know what is in the bottled water is to have it tested...
CAPTION: TOXINS FROM THE TAP...
Victor McKusick, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University, was in the game much earlier. He has been cataloging genes since 1959, compiling findings in his regularly updated publication, Mendelian Inheritance in Man. In August 1987 he introduced an electronic version that scientists around the world can tap into by computer. At the end of December it contained information on all the 4,550 genes identified to date. Says McKusick: "That's an impressive figure, but we still have a long way to go." Several other libraries of genetic information are already functioning, among them GenBank at the Los Alamos National...