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.
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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.
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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.
Sidebar: Most Western diets already contain very little of critically needed omega-3 EFAs. These are found in fish oil, flaxseed oil; also in moderate quantity in first-virgin olive oil. These EFAs (except in olive oil) go rancid quickly. And so, to extend their products' shelf life food processors remove all health-promoting EFAs while destroying or discarding most needed micronutrients.
Processors substitute either saturated fats or, now, partially hydrogenated trans fats. Found in all boxed and packaged foods that have long lists of hard-to-pronounce chemical names on the side, trans fatty acids consumed in large quantity can cause heart attacks and many other degenerative diseases.
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.
Sidebar: Chlorine in swimming pools reacts with organic matter such as sweat, urine, blood, feces, mucus and skin cells to form chloramines. Chloroform risk can be 70 to 240 times higher in the air over indoor pools than over outdoor pools. If the pool smells very much of chlorine, don't go into it.
Canadian researchers found that after swimming for an hour in a chlorinated pool, chloroform concentrations in the swimmers' blood ranged from 100 to 1,093 parts per billion (ppb). Researchers even recorded increases in chloroform concentration in bathers' lungs of about 2.7 ppb after a 10-minute shower in chlorinated water. For many people the intake through those routes is much greater than in water taken orally.
Studies in Belgium have related development of deadly malignant melanoma to consumption of chlorinated water. Franz H. Rampen, et al., of the Netherlands, state that the worldwide pollution of rivers and oceans and the chlorination of swimming pool water have led to an increase in melanoma. That disease is not associated with exposure to ultraviolet light. People who work indoors all the time, exposed to fluorescent lights, have the highest incidence of melanoma.
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.2
CLICK HERE to continue to Part 2 of "Poisoning by Chlorinated Water"
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