Nexus - 0207 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

100 YEARS OF WATER CHLORINATION deleterious effects of heavily chlorinated water that is used for drinking purposes? The water supply in our town is chlorinated but not filtered. At times it is possible to smell the chlorine. Could this harm the began eighty years ago. Pataki found that the severity of heart disease among people over 50 years of age correlated directly with the quantities of chlorinated tap water they were accustomed to drinking. Interestingly, he also found a statistically significantly correlation which showed that those people over 50 who did not suffer from heart disease standardly drunk mostly non-chlorinated fluids, bottled water, or boiled water (it is known that chlorine can be released as a gas from water which is boiled).5 The editor replied: A search of the literature did not reveal any organized investigations on the problem of the effect of heavily chlorinated water on the human body. Allergic manifestations of chlorinated water have been reported. Many cases of asthma have been traced to an allergy to chlorinated water. In all these cases the asthma was Passwater reports that in South India the water is chlorinated, while in North India, it is not, and consistent with Sinclair's original intuition, the incidence of heart disease in the South is considerably higher than in the North. He also points out that since the drinking water of the northern capital, New Delhi, has been chlorinated, the heart disease rate of that city has sadly begun to climb.‘ In the National Enquirer (December 24th, 1974) Dr. Joseph Price of Saginaw General Hospital in Michigan is quoted as saying: relieved or disappeared when the patient drank distilled or unchlorinated water.* That same year an awareness of the detrimental health aspects of chlorination was expressed by H.M. Sinclair, Director of the Laboratory for Human Nutrition, Oxford University. Chlorine is the cause of an unprecedented disease epidemic which includes heart attacks and strokes. Chlorine is an insidious poison Most medical researchers were led to believe it was safe, but we are now learning the hard way that all the time we thought we were preventing epidemics of one disease, we were creating another. Two decades after the start of chlorinating our drinking water in 1904, the present epidemic of heart trouble and cancer began.’ Commenting on heart disease, Sinclair raised what in those times must have seemed an almost incredible accusation. He wrote: "It is possible that one of the greatest public health measures ever introduced - the chlorination of public water supply could assist the [heart] disease".‘ Sinclair himself could hardly have perceived how prophetic the alleged association would be between chlorination and heart disease. In a suggestive study by Ronald Pataki, an astounding correlation of just these factors was discovered in Jersey City, New Jersey, the place - it will be recalled - where the first comprehensive chlorination of municipal water supplies In his book titled Coronaries, Cholesterol, Chlorine, Price reports a study in which contrast to the control group, chickens reared on chlorinated water all showed evidence of either atherosclerosis of the aorta or obstruction of the circulatory system.* Chlorine is further implicated in heart disease by the work of E.P. Benditt, Professor, Department of Pathology at the University of Washington, whose research in 1974 associated plaque formation in the arteries with chlorination. His research suggested that because of mutations in their genetic program caused by mutagenic or even carcinogenic substances in the bloodstream, and other substances released by the arteries as a result of high blood pressure, cells in the arterial wall proliferate to form plaque.’ Recent studies by Revis et. al. add further strength to the insidious link between water chlorination and heart disease. They report that they observed “hypercholestorlemia and cardiac hypertrophy in pigeons and rabbits exposed to chlorinated drinking water" and "significant increases in plasma cholesterol and aortic atherosclerosis in pigeons exposed to three commonly used drinking water disinfectants” {chlorine, chlorine dioxide and monochloramine]." soe 28¢NEXUS APRIL-MAY 1992 gastrointestinal or the genitourinary tract?” In the mid-seventies the issue of the health hazards