The Trouble with Chlorine

Anyone who’s bathed or washed their hair in non-chlorinated water will know how much better it is than chlorinated water on skin and hair. And we’re talking about water with only the minute amount of chlorine that municipal water treatment involves. Likewise, anyone with dyed hair who’s swum in a public swimming pool will know how harsh the chlorine is on it. If chlorine is harsh on skin and hair, which are specifically designed to deal with all sorts of external factors, it surely stands to reason that it’s equally—if not more—harsh on all the cells inside us that encounter chlorine every time we drink municipal tap water. It makes no sense that it’s harsh on your skin and hair, but not on the lining of your gastro-intestinal tract or, indeed, every other cell inside you, does it?

And the very same things can be said of ammonia, another chemical commonly used to boost the effect of chlorine in municipal water treatment. Use ammonia on your hands or hair and you’ll know just how harsh a chemical it is.

And remember, you are what you eat and drink. Everything put in your mouth that doesn’t go out in your body’s waste eventually becomes a part of your body. That includes all the nutrients your body needs as well as the toxins your body is far better off without. Chlorine and ammonia clearly fall in the latter category. In fact, these two chemicals are used in water treatment specifically for their toxic properties: that is, they are highly toxic to waterborne bacteria. Chlorine is toxic to humans as well, but is only lethal in much larger doses than we receive in drinking water, doses like those received by many soldiers who encountered it during WWI.

But because a chemical is not lethal to us in the minute doses found in municipal drinking water does not mean that it isn’t toxic to us. Because it doesn’t kill us outright doesn’t mean it isn’t still poisonous. All it means is that we’re receiving it in too small a dose to be able to clearly connect it with any of the illnesses or physical deterioration it causes. But—make no mistake—toxins do cause those things, whether suddenly with large doses or gradually with small ones. The variables involved in human health and resistance to disease are such that minute doses of toxins like these, repeated daily over months and years, will affect everyone differently and, so, will never be found guilty of causing any particular disease. But even if chronic exposure to a toxicant cannot be labeled the cause of a given disease in the same way that acute exposure can, it can still have profound effects on our health.

So when we’re dealing with chlorine, ammonia and other toxic additives to our water, it comes down to this simple question: Can we really afford to deal with known toxins in our drinking water as innocent until proven guilty? Or is a more cautious approach called for? It’s your health. You be the judge.

The danger of Cryptosporidium, E. coli and other waterborne diseases in untreated municipal water is such that municipalities see the chlorine and ammonia they use to treat their water as the lesser of 2 evils. There can be no doubt that they are right in seeing these chemicals as less dangerous to our health than the threat of the epidemics our towns and cities would encounter without them. After the introduction of chlorination in 1910, “the national typhoid death rate in the United States… dropped from 36 to 5 cases per 100,000 people” (Stewart, p. 76). Conversely, the failure to carefully regulate municipal chlorine-ammonia treatment has led to a number of deaths over the past 20 years. There can be no denying that chlorine use in municipal water treatment has saved many lives over the past century. However, with the kind of filtration offered by Doulton’s ceramic filters, we are not forced to choose one or the other of these 2 options. Both reverse osmosis and Doulton’s ceramic filtration offer alternatives safer than that provided by the use of chlorine in water treatment.

Bibliography

Stewart, John Cary. Drinking Water Hazards. Hiram, OH: Envirographics, 1990.

© Robert E. Freeman 2005