Gold & Silver Forum

mercola.com on chlorine and water (turns out its true, of course):

Poisoning By Chlorinated Water

Written by Joseph G. Hattersley, May 1999

Federal regulations require chlorine treatment of the water supplied to urban/suburban America from surface sources such as lakes, reservoirs and rivers. That constitutes about 75 percent of water that Americans consume. (Water from underground sources generally is not chlorinated unless it is supplemented by surface water. My hometown, Lacey, Washington, and some surrounding communities that are supplied water by Lacey, are fortunate to be among that group; I'd like to see that continue.)

Chlorination is inferior water treatment on at least two counts.

Although it has greatly lowered infectious waterborne diseases in the U.S. and Canada, chlorination fails against a variety of water problems including parasites and can seriously harm people who use the water.

Its cost is unnecessarily high. Andover, Massachusetts new ozone treatment costs $83 per million gallons of purified water, only two-thirds as much as the old treatment process. The town saves $64,000 annually in chemicals costs alone, and uses less electricity.

Let's explore this. When chlorinated water is run through a hose or carried in a pail followed by milk as in a dairy, what happens? "Very tenacious, yellowish deposits chemically similar to arterial plaque" form; with unchlorinated water this doesn't happen.

CBS' "Sixty Minutes" show July 11, 1992, displayed two laboratory rats, both of them eating standard rat chow and drinking chlorinated water. One rat had clear arteries. The other was also drinking pasteurized, homogenized milk.

When the animals were sacrificed and cut open, the arteries of its milk-drinking companions were clogged.

A scientist in a white coat winked at the camera and said, "He [the rat he was holding] is the only one doing research on that." The researcher didn't say why, but the powerful dairy and chemical lobbies come to mind.

Dairy buckets and hoses, and rats' arteries resist the arterial-wall damage known as atherosclerosis. But what can chlorinated water and milk, particularly homogenized milk, do to the far more susceptible arteries of humans? The arteries of young chickens are about as susceptible to such damage as people's arteries. So as a first approximation, J.M. Price, MD gave cockerels (roosters less than a year old) only chlorinated water.

They rapidly developed arterial plaques; and the stronger the concentration of chlorine, the faster and worse the damage. Other cockerels given unchlorinated water developed no such damage.2

The residents of the small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, had no heart attacks despite a diet rich in saturated animal fats and milk -- until they moved away from Roseto's mountain spring water and drank chlorinated water. After that, consuming the same diet, they had heart attacks.2 The Roseto example is dramatic enough, but the needed detailed comparisons and follow-up are not likely to be done.

What's Going on Here?

Highly reactive chlorine is one of the industrial waste products profitably disposed of into us Americans like garbage cans, then on into the environment.

Chlorine oxidizes lipid (fatty) contaminants in the water. It thus creates free radicals 2 (highly reactive sub-atomic particles lacking an electron) and oxysterols (formed when lipid molecules combine with oxygen molecules).

We require moderate numbers of both free radicals and oxysterols. The immune system employs free radicals to kill cells that its cellular immune mechanism can't handle. A second mechanism using free radicals initiates programmed cell death known as apoptosis. And moderate quantities of oxysterols, like cholesterol itself, serve a protective function.

But excess free radicals and excess oxysterols damage arteries and initiate cancer, among many other kinds of harm.

How well does the incidence of heart attacks match the areas where, and times when water is/was chlorinated?

Chlorination spread throughout America in the second and third decades of this century, about 20 years before the mushrooming of heart attacks. Light chlorination, we will recall, yielded slow growth of plaques in Price's cockerels; and so chlorination of people's drinking water at the usual low concentration would have been expected to take at least 10-20 years to produce clinical manifestations of atherosclerosis. The timing fits, and the Roseto example fits.

A physician team led by William F. Enos autopsied three hundred GIs who had died in battle in the Korean War. These men, who had passed induction examination as healthy, averaged 22.1 years of age; the doctors wondered what they would find. To their shock and amazement, in seventy-seven percent of the 300 they found "gross evidence of arteriosclerosis in the coronary arteries." In several, one or more heart arteries were partly or completely occluded (blocked).

Although Dr. Enos didn't try to explain his grisly discovery, he assumed arterial clogging had developed gradually. Seeming to support that assumption, almost 20 years later advanced arterial damage was discovered in ninety-six percent of nearly 200 consecutive babies who had died in their first month outside the womb. Two of those babies coronary arteries were blocked, causing infantile heart attacks.

But did arterial damage in fact develop slowly?

The water American soldiers had to drink in Korea was so heavily chlorinated that many could hardly tolerate it.

In Vietnam too, autopsies of American solders found heart-artery damage. Again, water supplied to them had been heavily chlorinated.2 Did much of these soldiers' arterial damage develop, not gradually but quickly as in Dr. Price's cockerels? The truth-slow or rapid development of clogging - may never be known.

Industrial chemist J.P. Bercz, PhD, showed in 1992 that chlorinated water alters and destroys unsaturated essential fatty acids (EFAs), the building blocks of people's brains and central nervous systems.

The compound hypochlorite, created when chlorine mixes with water, generates excess free radicals; these oxidize EFAs, turning them rancid.

And chlorine reacts with organic compounds in water to produce trihalomethanes (THMs) such as carcinogenic (cancer originating) chloroform and carbon tetrachloride. It is the combination of chlorine and organic materials already in the water that produces cancer-causing byproducts. The more organic matter in the water, the greater is the accumulation of THMs.

In a study of more than 5,000 pregnant women in the Fontana, Walnut Creek and Santa Clara areas of California, researchers from the state health department found that women who drank more than five glasses a day of tap water that contained over 75 parts per billion of THMs had a 9.5 percent risk of spontaneous abortions, i.e. miscarriage.

Women with lower exposure to the contaminants showed 5.7 percent risk. No comparison was given for women who ingested no THMs.

Taking a warm shower or lounging in a hot tub filled with chlorinated water, one inhales chloroform. And worse, warm water opens the pores, causing the skin to act like a sponge, and so one will absorb and inhale more chlorine in a 10-minute shower than by drinking eight glasses of the same water.

This irritates the eyes, the sinuses, throat, skin and lungs, makes the hair and scalp dry, worsening dandruff.

It can weaken immunity.

A window from the shower room open to the outdoors removes chloroform from the shower room air. But to prevent absorption of chlorine through the skin, a shower-head that removes chlorine from shower water is a must.

Long-term risks of consuming chlorinated water include excessive free radical formation, which accelerates aging, increases vulnerability to genetic mutation and cancer development, causes difficulty metabolizing cholesterol, and promotes hardening of arteries.

Excess free radicals created by chlorinated water also create dangerous toxins in the body. These have been directly linked to liver malfunction, weakening of the immune system and pre-arteriosclerotic changes in arteries (which, as we saw, struck Dr. Price's cockerels and may have happened to American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam). Excess free radicals have been linked also to alterations of cellular DNA, the stuff of inheritance.

Chlorine also destroys antioxidant vitamin E, which is needed to counteract excess oxysterols/free radicals for cardiac and anti-cancer protection.

Other Harm from Chlorination

A study in the late 1970s found that chlorinated water appears to increase the risk of gastrointestinal cancer over a person's lifetime by 50 to 100 percent. This study analyzed thousands of cancer deaths in North Carolina, Illinois, Wisconsin and Louisiana. Risk of such cancers results from use of water containing chlorine at or below the E.P.A. (Environmental Protection Agency) standard and "is going to make the E.P.A. standard look ridiculous," stated Dr. Robert Harris, lead scientist in the study.

Later, a meta-analysis found chlorinated water is associated each year in America with about 4,200 cases of bladder cancer and 6,500 cases of rectal cancer. Chlorine is estimated to account for 9 percent of bladder cancer cases and 18% of rectal cancers. Those cancers develop because the bladder and rectum store waste products for periods of time. (Keeping the bowels moving regularly will minimize such risk.)

Chlorinated water is also associated with higher total risk of combined cancers. Chlorine in treated water can cause allergic symptoms ranging from skin rash to intestinal symptoms to arthritis, headaches, and on and on.

Why does chlorine in water cause these problems? It destroys protective acidophilus, which nourishes and cooperates with the immunity-strengthening "friendly" organisms lining the colon. And, as mentioned earlier, chlorine combines with organic impurities in the water to make trihalomethanes (THMs), or chloramines. The more organic matter, the more THMs; and like excess oxysterols they are carcinogens.

Recent research has found a new hazard in chlorinated water: a byproduct called MX. A research team from the National Public Health Institute in Finland discovered that, by causing genetic mutations, MX initiates cancer in laboratory animals. And DCA (dichloro acedic acid) in chlorinated water alters cholesterol metabolism, changing HDL ("good") to LDL ("bad") cholesterol -- and causes liver cancer in laboratory animals.

Is there a better substitute for chlorine in water treatment: Yes. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) destroys infectious organisms and impurities in water 4,000 times better than chlorine. Ozone (O3) treatment, mentioned on earlier, is equally effective. Eleven hundred cities, worldwide, treat their drinking water with ozone; many have done so since as early as 1901. (Los Angeles treats its drinking water with H2O2, then adds chlorine. Some chlorine may be added after ozonation, to prevent re-infestation; only about one-third as much is needed.)

To generate ozone, dry air or oxygen is passed through a high-voltage electrical field. Ozone drinking-water treatment in Andover, Massachusetts successfully controlled the effects of algae blooms and eliminated water quality problems. Potential THM formation was reduced by an average of 75 percent.

But H2O2 and O3 are relatively cheap; moreover, the only byproducts are pure oxygen and hydrogen, so no one can make a big immediate profit on them. (Hydrogen is a potential major energy source for electricity generation and for zero-emission vehicles, and so it could be important in future years.) France and Germany, wiser and less controlled by the chemical industry, chlorinate water only in emergencies.

The chemical companies pulled off a huge coup when they bamboozled America and Canada into chlorination. They make big profits disposing of excess chlorine into our drinking water; otherwise, they would have to pay to destroy it. So now we know why American water isn't treated with safe, cheaper, more effective ozone. And now we know why Dr. Price's revealing studies with cockerels were never followed up.

Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) tests have shown that "in the water we drink, over 2,100 organic and inorganic chemicals [including pesticides, heavy metals, radon, radioactive particles] and parasitic organisms including cryptosporidium have been identified; 156 of them are pure carcinogens. (In 1993, cryptosporidium killed more than 100 and infected over 400,000.)

Of those, 26 are tumor promoting [they can make an existing tumor grow]. Exposure to cryptosporidium in people with lowered gastrointestinal immune function could lead to chronic GI infection. Other examples include recurring cases of Legionnaire's disease, a pneumonia caused by Legionella pneumophila, which may lurk in hot water supplies.

A public notice recently issued in Washington, D.C. warned that a high level of bacteria in the [chlorinated, fluoridated city system] water made it unsafe for dialysis patients, AIDS patients, organ transplant patients, the elderly and infants. Water contamination is the worst in small communities that can't afford proper treatment; the EPA has not released this information.

And hearings before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight discussed Pfiesteria outbreaks among people drinking chlorinated water. The organism, which kills fish, sickens some people; they get sick from drinking the water, not from eating infected seafood. The EPA's Robert Perciasepe said, in written testimony, that "Any new public health policy on this issue needs to consider reduction of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in our waters."

A bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would require managers of municipal water systems to tell customers what contaminants have been found in local drinking water. But with present crude test methods, that would offer little help.

Sherry Rogers, MD, pioneer in and authority on environmental medicine (EM), raises the number of chemicals in drinking water to 5,000. And 85 percent of American aquifers supplying wells below 8,000 feet altitude are contaminated with heavy metals; a recent federal report says the water you drink may have been recycled from sewage waste back to drinking water five times. As the late Kevin Treacy, MD of Australia said, "If municipal water were introduced now, it would not be allowed."

The EPA called 129 of the contaminants found in water supplies "dangerous" singly, let alone in combination. Pesticides and other toxic wastes run off farmlands and pastures or are dumped by factories, pollute rivers and seep into underground aquifers. Aptly called "biocides" by Russell Jaffe, MD, PhD, pesticides are designed to end life; few have been shown to be safe. The EPA depends on producers of pesticides to test their safety: the wolf guards the hen house. It should be no surprise that the tests take a long time, and many have been fraudulent.

Further, one poison is tested at a time; synergistic effects of combinations, potentially far worse, are ignored. Besides, many of the so-called "inert" substances in pesticide combinations are more toxic than the "active;" one of the "inerts" is DDT, prohibited for American farm use since 1973.

Are these contaminants dangerous in such minute quantities? Yes! In a laboratory, healthy living cells weakened, malfunctioned and some died within seconds or minutes when exposed to toxins commonly detected in American drinking water such as mercury, nickel, cadmium and lead at the extremely low concentration of only one part per billion (ppb).

Isn't all that bad enough without the deliberate addition of the further toxicity of chlorine?

Protection of water: Government laboratories test only for bacterial content and a few of the major inorganic toxins such as lead and arsenic. So, to get a complete water test one must consult a private laboratory.

Consumer Reports, in October 1999, rated the simpler Culligan filter, which easily attaches to a kitchen faucet, very high; and it is relatively inexpensive (about $14 at Walgreens).