I wrote about chlorine in drinking water yesterday. Here’s some more about chorinated water

Yesterday we had a reader contact us asking about our article about chlorinated drinking water, and the risks of drinking water contaminated with chlorine.

He asked a question about a point that we hadn’t covered. If we don’t like chlorine in the water we drink, what would happen if we didn’t have the chlorine?

Good point well made. We didn’t actually advocate the discontinuation of chlorine purification from municipal water supplies. Chlorine fulfills a very important function.

There is absolutely no doubt that our water supplies, including our drinking water, can be contaminated with various bugs and living organisms that would seek to do us harm. If we were to drink water that had not been treated for contamination by organisms like bacteria we would all run a very high risk of getting seriously ill.

We advocate the use of water filtration to remove water contaminants of any kind, and advocate the importance of drinking clean water. Chlorine free drinking water.

Chlorine works well to kill nasties that may be in our water, and this is good. If the chlorine wasn’t there our water would be just about undrinkable from a health point of view, just look at what is happening in Zimbabwe right now with people contracting cholera, sometimes from contaminated water.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, chlorine is necessary in municipal water to combat living contaminants.

For some people it isn’t necessary to have chlorine in our water. The authors have chosen to install rainwater tanks (and we use the best water filter to filter that water) so that they are drinking the cleanest water possible, and it isn’t necessary to chlorinate rainwater. Well so far it isn’t necessary. But municipal water supplies are different.

So don’t get us wrong, chlorine currently performs an essential task, and will probably be in our water for a long time. Just remember, you don’t need to drink chlorine. The best water filters will remove it, so your water is uncontaminated by chlorine.

Modern carbon filtering successfully removes chlorine. Read the rest of this entry

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Does the chlorine put in our water expose us to the risk of cancer?

Interesting question and one which, unfortunately, there is no one authoritative answer. Chlorine in drinking water is the subject of much debate.

Because like all these things it’s pretty hard to prove one way or the other. But it seems that there is a definite link between drinking chlorinated water and getting cancer, and there are studies suggesting that drinking chlorinated water can indeed cause cancer. It seems the risks of chlorine in our water are there.

How do we know? Well take this quote from the Medical College of Wisconsin, Senior Research Team.

“We are quite convinced, based on this study, that there is an association between cancer and chlorinated water.”

Now that’s a little scary isn’t it? They seem quite convinced that there is a clear link between chlorine in our drinking water and cancer.

How about this. “The Australian”, an Australian newspaper, reported on January 20th 2007 that “swimming or showering in or drinking chlorinated water may all be linked with an increased risk of bladder cancer” based on a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology by Spanish researchers.

And even back in the 1960s there was a book published by a doctor linking chlorine in water to the development of atheroschlerosis. Atheroschlerosis is a major disease leading to heart attacks and death.

Here’s a quote from the U.S. Council of Environmental Quality: “Cancer risk among people using chlorinated water is as much as 93% higher than among those whose water does not contain chlorine.”

You’d be surprised at how much chlorine there can be in your drinking water. It is quite possible to test your chlorine levels, there is a simple test kit that you can buy commercially, it’s not expensive. You’d be surprised to know that often the chlorine levels in your tap  water are higher than that of swimming pool water. That’s why it tastes so bad.

The health risks of chlorine aren’t necessarily from the chlorine itself. The problems come from the chemicals formed as a byproduct of having the chlorine in the water.  Chlorine in water mixes with other substances to form chemicals called trihalomethanes and it is suspected that it is the action of these trihalomethanes that does damage to our body, damaging cells and initiating cancer.

So it seems that there are clear links between having chlorine in our drinking water and disease. Though not fully proven these links are strong enough to convince us, at least, that we don’t want to be drinking chlorine.

How? The worlds best water filters remove chlorine from drinking water. When you consider the risk of cancer, the cost of removing chlorine from our water is tiny indeed. It is even possible to get high quality filters to enable whole house water filtering so that you can remove chlorine from you shower water and all other water you consume in the house.

There’s no doubt that we  are all taking a risk drinking chorinated water. It’s simple to remove, and filtering chlorine out of your water may well be the best thing you could ever do for your health. Read the rest of this entry

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