Chlorine has saved more lives than any other substance in our history.
As a sanitizer, chlorine destroys microbe cells. Hence, these pathogens develop no resistance to it, unlike many drugs which must pass through the cell membrane before acting.
Chlorine has been estimated to be involved in up to 85% of the manufactured chemicals which are important to our lives. These include such diverse applications as drug manufacture and polyvinyl chloride which is used to bring us a lead-free drinking water supply.
Despite its august history, chlorine remains under attack by Greenpeace and other environmental terrorists which have taken advantage of a chemically illiterate public to promote many myths and fallacies about this important element.
Consider this “Tip to Keep Your Home Environment Healthy” which was discovered by Lewis Walter of Madison, NJ. It was published in a hospital newsletter in Summit, NJ.
”Install an exhaust fan in your shower,if you don’t already have one, to remove methyl chloroform which can be present. The gas, which is given off as the hot water passes through the showerhead, is why many people feel sleepy after a hot shower.”
The fear of chlorocarbon formation (such as methyl chloroform) drives much of the insanity concerning proposed chlorine bans. A look beyond the rhetoric to some actual measurements of chlorocarbon concentrations reveals a different story.
The following information was reported at the 1994 American Oil Chemists’ Society annual meeting in Atlanta.
The amount of chloroform found in laundry bleach (which is about 5% chlorine) is less than 0.4 parts per million. This is within federal drinking water standards for chloroform. (DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DRINK ANY BLEACH.)
The amount of chloroform found in your washing machine during a bleach cycle (which is about 100 parts per million chlorine) was found to be about 0.5 parts per trillion.
Drinking water is chlorinated at the rate of about 5 parts per million. How likely does it seem to you that sufficient methyl chloroform will develop in the water of your shower to make you sleepy?
You may still have doubts about chlorine’s vital role in the world today. But the people of Peru don’t. The Peruvian government, concerned for its citizens’ health, banned the chlorination of drinking water so the people would not be exposed to this deadly toxin. Thousands died in the ensuing cholera epidemic--the worst of the 20th century. (Read about it in NATURE, volume 354 (1991), p 255.)