Health Highlights: July 9, 2009

The GAO's John Stephenson said Americans spend more than $11 billion a year on bottled water -- equaling an estimated 200 bottles annually for every "man, woman and child." But the oversight of bottled water is "less stringent" than for tap water. For instance, there are no rules for a potentially dangerous chemical used in plastics, DEHP, that could seep from the bottles, Stephenson said.

Joseph Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association, said bottled water is a "safe, healthy convenient food product that is comprehensively regulated." He suggested that consumers who want to know where the water comes from just call the manufacturer.

But Jane Houlihan, of the Environmental Working Group, said that information should be printed on the label. According to CBS News, she said that consumers have a "right to know where their bottled water comes from, how or if it's treated and the pollutants it contains."

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Wednesday Darkest Day for Suicides: Study

Forget what you've heard about the Monday morning blues. A new study shows that Americans are most likely to commit suicide on Wednesdays.

A five-year study, published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, found that nearly 25 percent of suicides take place on Wednesdays, followed by Mondays or Saturdays, which were tied with 14 percent, MSNBC reported.

Researchers had typically considered Monday the day of despair. But now they theorize that the Internet's ability to keep people feeling connected over the weekend may be responsible for the shift, making mid-week job stress more of a problem than weekend solitude.

"By Wednesday, the traffic has gotten to be too much, their co-workers are getting on their nerves and they can't figure out how they're going to make it to the end of the week," the report's lead author, Augustine J. Kposowa, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside, told MSNBC.

Also, contrary to earlier research that showed more suicides in winter and spring, the new study found almost no seasonal differences -- a change that Kposowa also attributes to technological connectedness. Winter doesn't isolate folks the way it once did, he said.

He and his colleagues studied deaths among people age 18 and older from all 50 states from 2000 through 2004. About 30,000 people in that group took their lives each year on average, they found.