Ion chromatography fluoride testing explained by the Health Ranger

Sunday, March 13, 2016 by: S. Johnson
Tags: Health Ranger, ion chromatography, scientific testing

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(NaturalNews) A new problem is developing in the United States, and it's right underneath our feat. The bulk of America's water infrastructure, which consists of more than 1 million pipes under the streets, is corroding. As a result, many people are drinking tap water contaminated with toxic heavy metals and don't even know it.

Since government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can no longer be trusted, the time has come for citizen scientists to keep tabs on tap water. This is exactly what Mike Adams, a citizen scientist who runs his on food forensics lab, is doing. In particular, Adams and his team are testing water samples from American cities using ion chromatography (IC), a process that detects concentrations of major anions like fluoride, chloride, nitrate, nitrite and sulfate.

How ion chromatography works

"Because the detector detects resistance, what we are trying to do is make the thing we're looking for have high conductivity while the background noise has low conductivity," Adams explained during a demo of the IC.

IC calculates concentrations of ionic species by isolating them based on how they interact with an LC column. How ionic species separate in the column is dependent on their size and chemistry. Ions are bound by column constituents as they move through a pressurized chromatographic column. Then, a fluid called an eluent, which is used to elute, or remove, a substance from a surface, goes through the column. The absorbed ions start to separate from the column. The amount of time it takes a solute to travel through the column helps determines the ionic concentrations of the samples.

The applications of ion chromatography are many. It can be used to analyze drinking water for contaminants, determine the water chemistry in an ecosystem, deduce the sugar and salt content in food and isolate specific proteins.

"The EPA uses this same instrument. This is how they test city water. This tells us if fluoride is at the parts per million that it's supposed to be, which I think was lowered to two parts per million last year. In some cities, their fluoride injectors are miscalibrated and they're injecting five to six parts per million of fluoride," Adams said.

A renegade scientist

Adams' work shouldn't be taken with a grain of salt nor with a drop of tap water. He uses the same methodology as the EPA. His lab is ISO/IEC 17025-pending, meaning it meets the requirements of a professional lab and is awaiting accreditation. For the IC instrument, the lab uses EPA methods 300.0 and 300.1, which are explained here. "We are using the EPA's own science to expose the EPA," Adams said.

What makes Adams' lab all the more unique is that it is completely independent and does not answer to bureaucrats. Within six months, Adams will be able to use this technology to identify other Flint, Michigan, problems elsewhere in the country.

"I've heard through other sources that every city east of the Mississippi, which is the older part of the country, has older pipes. The older pipes are corroding and they have alloys that contain a lot of lead. So as they corrode, they release lead into the water," Adams noted.

With this technology, Adams has teamed up with a former NASA contract scientist to conduct a nationwide scientific analysis of heavy metals in America's tap water. They plan to test water samples of at least 100 large U.S. cities and post their results for the public to see at EPAWatch.org.

Click here for instructions on how you can send in water to the Health Ranger's lab and do your part to help map drinking water quality and health risks in cities across America.

"It takes a renegade guy like me to do this." Adams said. "It really does. No one in academia will dare expose the EPA or they'd lose all their funding."

Sources include:

SERC.Carleton.edu

EPAWatch.org

CASlab.com

Science.NaturalNews.com