So how are we exposed to chemicals?
I'm going to talk a little bit of that now.
In here, in this picture, I want to show you kind of a classical framework, or exposure pathway schematic it's called, of how we might be exposed to chemical contaminants in our environment.
And here's a classic case.
So imagine, that's your house there on the left.
And these days it might not necessarily be a leaking drum of chemical waste, but perhaps it's something like, an oil well, a fracking location, where there's the use of chemicals as lubricants in the fracking operations, or, in fact, some of the byproducts of oil drilling.
Getting into the ground water.
So here in this picture it tries to show the big king of cycle of how things might leak into the environment, and leach through the soil, into the ground water, be carried through the groundwater and perhaps then ingested, either by somebody who in this case has a well.
Or by a population downstream, who may drink from a river or a stream.
But if you can kind of follow this, imagine a chemical, which is synthesized, gets delivered to the environment in some way.
All right.
May travel through the air, as a vapor or a mist, settle down into the soil, and down through the soil into the water.
Where it may also be picked up in the water table, not just as a drinking water contaminant, but it might be picked up by wildlife.
So, contamination that is in the water supplies, or the waterways, might be taken up by organisms living in those streams, and amplified, or brought to us, through edible fish, for instance.
Or, back to this diagram, you see the, not that everybody has a cow in the background but just imagine you have fallout of a chemical from a smoke stack nearby or, or from some release nearby, or, pesticide spray.
And you have a cow, eating the grass that's growing there.