Game for kid: Fw: Fwd: Water Report

Click here if you are unable to view this image.

Is Your Water Safe?
How Modern Water Sanitation Can Damage Your Health

If you live in a typical urban or suburban area, the water you use every day is very likely loaded with chlorine, and something FAR more toxic; something you may have never even heard of. Disinfection byproducts (DBPs) are contaminants found in nearly every municipal water supply that adds chlorine, and they are over 100 times more toxic than chlorine.

That clear, clean-looking liquid you use every day to quench your thirst, to bathe in, to wash your dishes and laundry – is far from the fresh, pure resource you might assume. In fact, depending on where you live, the time of year, and your individual susceptibility,
you could be exposed to dangerously high levels of DBPs in the chlorinated water you and your family use at home, at school or at work.

Chlorine is used to sanitize both public water supplies and swimming pools, and in the manufacture of bleached paper products. This potent chemical is also used to make plastics and pesticides.

It is important to understand that chlorine itself is relatively benign and breaks down to chloride in your body, which is not much different from the chloride ion in salt. The problem is that it reacts with organic material already dissolved in the water, forming these far more toxic DBPs.

Chlorination of public water systems began in the United States a century
ago, in 1908, in Jersey City, New Jersey,1 and is still one of the most
common disinfection techniques used at water treatment facilities today.

The primary reason for adding chlorine to water is to make it safe to drink
by killing or inactivating harmful microorganisms that cause diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and giardiasis.

Without question, chlorine does work to help keep us free from infectious
diarrheas. We can be thankful that we don't get sick from our tap water like people in many underdeveloped countries do.

However, chlorine's effectiveness as a water sanitizer is due in part to its characteristic as a persistent chemical. In other words, it doesn't break down like other sanitizing agents. It is able to withstand hundreds of miles of travel, through centuries' old piping systems, to deliver water to your home that is free of waterborne contaminants. That's the good news. The bad news?

The bad news?

Chemicals that are persistent, like DBPs, also tend to be very toxic. Given the wide variety of applications for chlorine, many of which we are exposed to several times a day, every day, it's not surprising to learn that
we are polluting our bodies and the world at an unprecedented rate. The term chlorine pollution means we ingest from 300 to 600 times what the Environmental Protection Agency considers a "safe" amount. And with devastating results.

The health effects from the DBPs created during water chlorination can be carcinogenic and/or have effects on reproduction and development. Large amounts of studies show there is a relation between chlorinated drinking water and bladder-, intestinal- and anal cancer. According to the U.S. Council of Environmental Quality, the cancer risk to people who drink chlorinated water is 93 percent higher than among those whose water does not contain chlorine.


These byproducts do not break down readily; they bio-accumulate, meaning they are absorbed faster than they are broken down. Hence the byproducts of chlorine can accumulate in your system at a greater rate than your body can detoxify in order to maintain your good health. The two primary DBPs formed when chlorine is used are: • trihalomethanes (THMs) • haloacetic acids (HAAs) There are safer, less costly water sanitizing agents, among them hydrogen peroxide and ozone. However, these treatments generate no disposal profits for the big chemical companies. The ultimate solution is home-based water filtration/sanitizing systems.