You can live for a few weeks without food as long as you have water, maybe eight or ten days without water, but only a few minutes without air. However, contaminated food, water or air can make you sick or even kill you if you aren't careful. Most of us trust the government to look out for us by insuring we can acquire clean, wholesome food, safe water and tolerable air. Even so, Mad Cow disease slipped past the government inspectors, and every now and again, people die from drinking supposed "safe water". Right! Go on and listen to them, and believe everything they tell you! Why not, the only life you have to lose is your own! History reveals that upon occasion, city water has become contaminated by amoebas, cysts or parasites like Giardia, Cryptosporidium or even some sort of off-the-wall industrial chemical waste or insecticide that has seeped into the groundwater or city water supply. Just type in "cryptosporidium, deaths, USA" into a search engine and see what comes back. I think I used dogpile.com. While you are at it, type in PCB deaths. Woah! It's always fun to see what the powers-that-be have to say after the fact as the bodies pile up around their feet. Want more? Type in DDT, deaths.

Most don't even want to talk about air pollution. That's obvious as you can see it. You don't need to be a miner with black lung disease to suffer and die from contaminated air either. City people who have never seen a mine expire every day from lack of being able to take another breath. Some days, one can't even step outside without suffering the effects of the sickly-looking brown cloud that hovers over most cities. Too bad that air pollution can be as much as ten times worse in our homes and places of work than outside in the open air. Consider the effects on the human condition of tobacco smoke, secondhand tobacco smoke, cooking smoke, gasses given off by carpets, furniture and even household cleaners. Then, what about biological contamination from humans, animals and insects? Add to that the contamination from mold, fungus, mildew, germs and bacteria. So where can we hide and what can we do? Even our own homes aren't safe. The bottom line is we have to look out for ourselves or suffer the consequences.

Yes, the honest truth is that we are going to have to start taking responsibility for our own wellbeing and safety. We can do that by carefully choosing what we eat, considering the quality of the water we drink, and scrutinizing the content of the air we breathe, at least in our own homes and places of work. Most of us never think about breathing until we can't. Then it only takes seconds for that unpleasant situation to move to the forefront of our minds. Think not? Consider people who suffer from allergy, asthma, bronchial disease or other lung disorders. Many of these people are often on the ragged edge of suffocation and are often in fear for their very lives, and well they should as not all of them will make it through their next attack.

Now unless you start growing your own, you are pretty much stuck with commercial foodstuffs. About all you can do is pay attention to announcements of production problems with food, like recalls on hamburger, chicken or anything else that is obviously suspect or dangerous like Mad Cow disease or Avian flue. In addition to that, always wash vegetables well with a mild soap solution and rinse well. Forget eating rare meat or raw seafood no matter how chick that might seem. Cook all meat to at least one hundred and sixty- five degrees F, testing with a meat thermometer. It's a good idea to wash poultry and seafood well before cooking too. Chicken and fish are particularly suspect as they have a tendency to spoil or grow bacteria cultures rather quickly as compared to beef or pork.

Eating raw or near raw meat of any sort is asking for trouble. Be careful! Even after cooking and eating food, always refrigerate leftovers as soon as they approach room temperature. Forget drinking raw milk or using raw dairy products too. Actually, adults shouldn't drink milk or ingest milk products at all for best health because of the hormones injected into milk cows to increase milk production. There are many well-researched, informative web sites, reports and books that deal with the folly of adult milk consumption. Notmilk.com or milksucks.com are good ones.

Ever go fishing and try to eat an old catfish that has been feeding off the bottom for years? It tastes awful! It has picked up all sorts of nasty smelling and tasting pollution. No one in their right mind would eat that fish! Then what about the Mercury contamination found in ocean fish? The Scientists say, "If you ever want to have children, don't eat fish!" Whew! Who is kidding who, and whom do you believe? Why believe anything? Wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself, and then take preventative measures? If you are smart, you will take responsibility for your own health and safety and protect yourself and your family to the best of your ability.

Water mist up high in the atmosphere starts out fairly clean, but then the particles bond together into drops, growing larger and larger. When conditions become right, drops of water become too heavy to be supported by the air and start falling through the clouds as rain where they pick up more mass along with foreign particles such as acids and whatever else they might pass through on their way down to earth. Then the water runs down the mountains into the streams and soon picks up a load of what we call hardness, rock, sand, dust, minerals, metals and biological contaminants such as those that emanate from dead and rotting animals and putrid vegetation. On down the slopes it flows until it reaches the flat land and runs through farms where it picks up excrement from the various animals and birds plus fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals. Later, the same water passes through industrial complexes where it picks up waste chemicals and compounds. Next, that water passes through dumps, towns, streets, gutters and sewers where it picks up garbage juice, human waste, wino puke, dog poop and who knows what all else. Then eventually, that same contaminated water reaches the city water treatment plant where the operators pass that contaminated water through sand filters to block passage of the larger chunks and then collect the effluent in outdoor holding ponds where the solids are allowed to settle. Once most of the crud settles or precipitates down to the bottom, the water technicians add just enough chlorine and a dash of fluoride to hopefully kill the biological contaminants before storing it in other open ponds until needed. Then finally, they pump the resulting water on to you and yours-enjoy!

You bet! You are expected to drink it, cook with it, wash your dishes, bodies, kids, dogs, clothes, windows and cars with it. Yes, rub it all over you! Have you ever noticed the crusty spots and rings left by tap water on dishes, glass or the paint of your car? There is your proof of the load of contamination a drop of water can and does carry when it comes to visit you. The city water technicians did a good job as far as it went. Yes, they did all they could do with the money allowed them for the clean-up project. However, nothing was done to remove the hardness trapped in the water, because the powers-that-be are in denial about the harm that sediment can do to you. They say you need those minerals. Sure. Then, why not scoop up a handful of dirt and eat it? You ought to be super healthy then! Wrong! Test show that you can't assimilate the minerals in raw dirt. The minerals have to be passed through a plant or an animal before we can make full use of them. That was shown up in a scam where a company was trying to sell people "Glacier Water" for about thirty dollars a quart. What a laugh! That company is no longer with us. Who would be stupid enough to pay thirty bucks for a quart of tap water with a handful of dirt tossed into it?

By-the-way, neither was anything done to remove any arsenic or lead that might have been lurking in the water. There are acceptable contamination levels, you know. However, it is interesting to consider that both arsenic and lead build up cumulatively over time. One day, no problem, next day oops! On the West side of Albuquerque, the water contains more arsenic than Federal law allows, yet nothing has been done about it, and people are drinking it. That is everyone who refused to take responsibility for their own health and safety and do something about the situation!

There is just one more thing to consider: after your water left the treatment plant, it languished in those holding ponds under birds and insects before it was finally pumped on to you. However, on the way, it passed through an aging network of leaky pipes, buried directly in the earth where further contaminants leached in and out along the way to your home. Just what contaminants is anybody's guess… Whatever they were, however, they remained for you and your family to swallow, rub all over your bodies and then wipe all over everything you have or use.

Haven't you ever wondered what some of those strange tastes are in the water you drink? Often, the stink is so bad you have to shut your eyes and hold your nose just to choke the stuff down. That's about the time when you start seeing and hearing government- sponsored media commercials assuring you and your neighbors that your tap water is safe to drink. Yes, and they suggest that you to put a squeeze of lemon in your water before drinking to cover up the nasty taste and odor. Either that, or shaking it up and putting it in a pitcher and letting it stand for a while before consuming. What? Do they think we are fools? Would you bend over and scoop up a handful of something that smelled like that off the ground and put it in your mouth? Not likely! See what I mean about taking responsibility for your own health and safety? Even if that stinky water were safe, would you want to drink it? What the heck, only a few people died from Cryptosporidium contamination from city water in the last couple of years. I don't know about you, but I'd hate to join them. Perhaps, I lack faith.

Let me ask you a question: If you went out in the morning to take a swim in your swimming pool and found it full of dog poop, would you jump in? No, I don't suppose you would. OK, here is another question: If you went out the following morning to take a swim in your swimming pool and found just one piece of dog poop floating in your pool, would you jump in? See, it's the same thing! It doesn't matter. A little or a lot is the same. Yuck is yuck! Our senses tell us not to allow ourselves to be exposed to potential poisons or obviously unclean material. We are mostly born with good mental capacity along with reasonable senses of taste and smell to help us ascertain whether or not we want to eat, drink or even breathe anything suspect to which we might become exposed.

Have you ever awakened during the night to the smell of someone smoking cigarettes somewhere in the house? Right! Yuck! Scientists tell us that secondhand smoke isn't good for us, and our senses agree. We can easily tell the veracity of this fact by the coughing fit we are experiencing. So we wake up to clear our lungs and take action to counteract the onslaught of that potential poison. Your nose knows!

Remember the piece of dog poop floating in the pool? Well, the air we are forced to breathe isn't a whole lot different. A little bad or really bad, it's all the same, except we can't choose not to jump in. For better or worse, we swim in the air 24/7, as there isn't anywhere else to go. Think I'm kidding? OK, there are usually some hills or high buildings in or around most cities. Just for fun, visit one of those high places that reach up above the brown cloud and look down over the city some sunny, summer afternoon and view the ugly brown crud that hovers over your town, permeating everything in it. I did that once up on South Mountain, overlooking Phoenix Arizona. I couldn't believe that evil looking cloud of brown soup. Before seeing the reality of it myself, smog was just something the newscasters spoke of on the evening news. After that experience, I moved to Mesa where the air is a lot cleaner. You got it! That brown soup covering your town looks just like you are standing next to a big swimming pool, deciding whether or not to jump in, doesn't it? The sad truth is that you will have to jump in whether you'd like to or not. Well, actually you don't swim in it, but you do walk around on the bottom, pretty much like that old catfish mentioned earlier!

Air is much like water in that it tends to pick up foreign matter, all it can carry. Nature hates a vacuum, you know! Air gathers up particles, dust, dirt, pollen, mold, fungus, spores, mildew, germs bacteria, mites, dead skin, insect feces, dander, gasses, fumes and other not-so-nice contaminants too numerous to relate. It's a bit like playing Russian Roulette. You never know what is in the air you breathe, and it only takes one little germ or bacterium to lodge in the mucus membrane inside of your nose or throat to make you sick. For those who suffer from allergies, it is a nightmare. Such people live under the sword of Damocles, just waiting to become stricken with their next episode of misery. Histamines flowing like water, sufferers gather up their arsenal of nose sprays, allergy pills, aspirin, chest rub, and let's not forget the Kleenex, lots of Kleenex and head for bed. The problem is widespread, and on any given day a fair percentage of the work force has called in sick- again. This malady costs industry millions of dollars in lost production and paid-out benefits every year. It also costs the sufferers a bunch of money in lost wages once their sick days run out.

An interesting point is that most contagion occurs in the home or the workplace, not out in the open. Studies show that indoor air is as much as ten times more contaminated than outdoor air, and we spend most of our time indoors these days, breathing it all in. One reason the insides of our homes and work places are so bad is that there is nothing to continuously sweep the air clean and purify it. Outdoors, it's quite different. Natural ozone and negative ions from Mother Nature kill most of the free-floating germs and bacteria. Conversely, there isn't a whole lot of ozone indoors, so there is little to clean up the air along with the debris in it. That is why we need to take responsibility for our own good health and comfort. We need to take charge and do something about this untenable situation.

Surely, you have visited the mountains, forests or the seashore and smelled the abundance of fresh air? Pleasant isn't it? Well, one reason air smells so fresh out there under the sun is because of lots of naturally occurring ozone and tons of negative ions that continually sweep the air clean all day long. Yes, our atmosphere, heated by the sun makes plenty of nature's second best purification agent, ozone. The volume of ozone is particularly noticeable in the vicinity of the seashore, waterfalls and big trees. Actually, the ozone is just a byproduct of the negative ions given off by lightning, the ocean, waterfalls and trees. If man and his manufactured pollutants were to disappear off the face of the Earth, the air and water would be washed clean in no time.

So how do these negative ions wash air and water clean? Easy, they add an extra oxygen atom to the mix, so instead of having 02, you have 03, an unstable atom. These natural negatively charged cleaners go zipping off on their sanitation missions by the trillions, and when they come upon a positively charged atom (stink atom), the zap it, neutralizing it right then and there just like Buck Rogers with his trusty ray gun. Ionization has become quite a science in the last half century or so, and since mankind has learned to make and use these little wonders to our advantage, things have become a lot cleaner. Notice there is nowhere near as much disease per capita these days as there was in the past even though there are lot more of us currently messing up our environment. Due to ionization, sanitation has improved greatly.

OK, so if these wonderful negative ions work so well in the outdoors, why can't they solve our problems with air and water in our homes? Well Vern, the answer is they can. However, we have to take charge and accept the responsibility for our own health and safety to make it happen. That means we'll have to purchase satisfactory negative ion generators to help clean our air, and powerful enough ion exchange units to help clean up our water. If we don't wake up and do it, who will?

Greetings: I'm Bill Lampe, The Water Man. I've been active in the quest for cleaner water since the early 1960's and cleaner air since the 1990's. I guess that dates me, doesn't it? Well, it's like this: I had to do something. I've been affected with respiratory problems since childhood, and I've probably bought and used enough Kleenex to cover Phoenix Arizona a foot deep in the last 50 or so years. I've also been plagued with kidney stones. Ouch! It seems that my body could manufacture those stones as fast as the doctors could fish them out. I guess you could say that I've done my share of suffering over the years, or at least I did until happily, I became introduced to the wonders of ionization and what it could do for me.

Now, I'm speaking here from my own life experience, and not mentioning any company names or making any unfounded claims for any particular contraption. Everyone, including me has a right to their own opinion and personal experience, and until congress changes the first amendment of the United States constitution, the world at large will just have to put up with me and my opinions. Of course, there are those hospital and doctor records proving I once had a problem. So, what do they prove? They prove that I spent a lot of money, suffered a lot of misery, but little else except that back in 1997, the snot and stones stopped coming, and so did the bills for their removal. Right! My problems disappeared, dried up, went away and that was that! Was it a miracle? Nope. Nothing of the sort! I simply found some decent ionization equipment along with adequate filtration that removed most of the crud from what I was drinking and breathing. If you don't put foreign material in your body, you won't have to either pass or pluck it out it later. No garbage in, no garbage out!

Science has come a long way in the last few years, and it has empowered us to take charge and potentially improve our health, safety and comfort greatly. No longer must we accept and deal with unclean air and water in our homes, as there now exists fairly inexpensive ionization and filtration equipment that will greatly improve the condition of our air and water right in our own homes where we need it! Yes, we can do individually for ourselves what the government cannot do. Now, the government is not at fault, as it is physically impossible to provide such services to end users, not to mention the cost would be astronomical if they could. The final cleaning of both air and water must be done in the home or place of work, not miles away in a central plant. That would be like washing your clothes and then going out and rolling in the mud before going to church. Even if the water could be "refined" at a central plant, the air could not. By the time either arrived to end users, the products would still need a final scrubbing to get rid of whatever they picked up along the way. The buck stops with you! So, here is how it is. If you really want cleaner water and air, you will have to take responsibility and acquire the necessary purification equipment just like I did.

If you would like to learn more, or are at your witts end and need some sensible answers, just fill out the linked information form or e-mail me at info@aco4u.com.

William Lampe,
"The Water Man"