Household Detergents, Shampoos May Form Harmful Substance in Waste Water...so watch out!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100407110819.htm
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So check this out:

There's this chemical in household detergents and shampoo called NDMA. It's been in these sorts of products for years upon years. But scientists have done their job. Turns out this chemical bully "may be a source of precursor materials for formation of a suspected cancer-causing contaminant in water supplies that receive water from sewage treatment plants"(Science 1).

Um...sewage treatment plants? That is water we at one point have come into contact with. That's kind of scary, if you ask me.

NDMA is a type of nitrosamine, which by definiton now is a semi-volatile organic chemical that is highly toxic and is a suspected human carcinogen"(Wikipedia 1). Carcinogen by definition is any substance that produces cancer. The reason I gave both definitions is because when I got the definition for NDMA, it said the word "carcinogen" and I didn't know what that meant so I looked that up too just to make sure I didn't look too stupid when I posted this post.

Scientists knew how NDMA reacted with processed meats and tobacco smoke because nitrosamines are commonly found in these products. However, one important aspect scientists didn't know, and that's how these chemicals reacted with water. Official scientific reports showed that "when mixed with chloramine, some household cleaning products -- including shampoo, dishwashing detergent and laundry detergent -- formed NDMA" (Science 1). This is bad news bears for those of us who like using shampoo and detergent. I love the stuff, so looks like over the weekend I'm going to have to find a safer detergent to wash my clothes in and a safer shampoo to clean my gorgeous locks with. I don't want to ruin the environment and make cancer more common in this water, whether it's used for drinking of not.