Chlorinated Drinking Water is Necessary for Public Health

With the aggregation of millions of people in large urban centers, there is an unprecedented amount of human waste to be treated. In this treatment, pathogenic microbes (bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and parasitic worms) must be removed or reduced to harmless levels. It is well known that in any community, at any time, there are always small numbers of people who are either manifestly ill, in some stage of illness but not demonstratively so, or healthy carriers of diseases. Together, these are indications of a community’s normal background of pathogenic microorganisms in which feces are in the sewage. As a result, sewage is a great threat to human health, especially for those who come in contact with water drawn from sewage contaminated sources.

Generally, sewage consists of 99.9% water and 0.02% solids. Although the amount of solids may seem small, in comparison to the amount of water that is flowed in a large city such as Washington D.C, solids amount to 200 tons/day (Benarde). Of this 40-50% is protein, 40-50% consist of carbohydrates, and the remaining 5-10% is fat (Benarde). All these substances are broken down from fecal matter. Fecal matter is known to be the leading cause of death, with a toll of 10 million a year. Some examples of diseases are typhoid and cholera; these are very common in third world countries, due to the lack of sanitation. In modern industrialized countries, sanitation is taken to higher step than in developing countries. For example in the United States, drinking water runs through a series of treatment steps before it is flowed into households, as for third world countries, water is usually pumped by a well with no treatment at all. Because of this, serious diseases develop in untreated, unsanit...

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... these filtration units take out over 90% of the chlorine available to a glass of treated water.

References:

Benarde, Melvin A. Our Precarious Habitat (fifteen Years Later). Chapter 11. John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Group 3. Chlorinated Drinking Water. Web page. 193.51.164.11/htdocs/Monographs/Vol/52/of-water.htm.

McAdam, Thelma. Chloramine in Water Supplies Poses Hazardous to Plants and Fish. Hans home page @ www.hans.org/index.html#WATER

McAdam, Thelma. Finnish Study Links Chlorinated Water to Cancer. Hans home page @ www.hans.org/chlorine.html

Rona, Zoltan. Rethinking Chlorinated Tap Water. Web page. www.wwonline.com/rona/chlor.html

Sneed, David. State water pipeline leaks chlorinated water, killing fish. Web page. Av.yagoo.com/bin/query?p==chlorinated+water&b=

Stern, Sherry. Enviromental Quality and Health. Spring Quarter lecture.