However, the amount of chemicals which water departments are putting in the water - chlorine to kill germs, ammonia (just what our fish and children need!) to bond with the chlorine as chloramine to keep the chlorine from boiling out and an aluminum compound (probably alum) to raise the pH in the water so that lead doesn't leak out of aging pipes, has increased. That doesn't count what environmental challenges the rest of us have left in the water. And the Bush administration, like them as I may in some ways, is retreating on controlling air pollution and its proposed new rules on mercury may prove to be one of the most cynical governmental environmental retreats in maybe a century of American history.

Also, the widespread use of antibiotics for human diseases and in the livestock industries may be helping whole generations of antibiotic resistant strains of various diseases to appear on the scene. A chemist friend pointed out that in the cattle industry, "they" simply put antibiotics in the cattle food. That may be cheaper and easier than giving each animal a shot, but most of that medicine just passes through their bodies and (eventually) into our streams and water supplies.

Other medicinal items are also showing up in the environment. In the Trinity River, a system in Texas which drains the sanitation facilities of a large population area, a recent study (alluded to on the NANFA mailing list) found the concentration of Prozac to be enough that prey fish like small bluegills were increasingly laid back about avoiding predators.

Anyone reading this, please feel free to correct any errors of fact or overstatement, but on the whole it seems that ours is an increasingly challenging world just in terms of keeping aquariums safe for our fish.

You aren't dumbing down. The world and water supplies are more difficult to deal with. Long gone are the days when I, as a kid, could use my finger to measure water temperature out of the faucet and routinely change the water in my goldfish bowl with straight tap water!