News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Ban chlorine and chloramine in the water too! The microorganisms will strengthen your immune system. Just like Haiti. :)
Water is often said to be the "element of life", and we need oxygen to live. But if you add one oxygen atom to a water molecule you end up with H2O2, or hydrogen peroxide, which is deadly.
This is the thing that the majority of people don't understand about chemistry. Just because one chemical (water is a chemical, btw) has the same word in its name as another chemical that's known to be highly toxic doesn't mean they're both toxic.
Chemistry is insanely complex and we are entirely unable to evaluate the toxicity of a chemical just by its name (without prior knowledge).
Maybe do like 5 min of research to learn how the treatment works and why it's completely safe?
You literally just proved my point. Congrats.
Man, just wait until you hear about this awful chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. It's used as an industrial solvent, cleaning agent, and all other kinds of destructive things, and they put it in your food! This shit can kill you if you breathe in too much, yet they put it in our food?!?!1?1
Is your argument that chlorine is as safe to consume as water?
No, just that your dAnGeRoUs ChEmIcAl assertion is FUD and spreading ignorance. But considering you 'unironically yes'-ed a comment referencing Haiti and how the microorganisms will strengthen your immune system, I'm entirely unsurprised.
As another person put it 'the dose is the poison'. Sure, chlorine is poisonous in large doses. But so is water.
If I had to choose between panicking over chlorinated water or spending billions of dollars to disinfect water in a less effective way...
I'd probably just let the water sit out for a while or run it through a cheap carbon filter because I'm not an idiot.
You think chlorine is mostly known for being used as a chemical weapon? Not, you know... Swimming pools?
You're a good example of why people make bad choices about science related public policy.
First, the poison is in the dose. There's a big difference between inhaling concentrated chlorine gas and drinking trace quantities.
Second, how do you propose we uv sterilize the water? We'd need to do so at the plant, but also at any holding cisterns. Or were you thinking of retrofit for houses? And not all microorganisms are strongly impacted by UV. It's tricky to find legitimate research, since the people who sell them say they work great, but what's out there paints a different picture of efficacy.
Nope, they don't treat the cisterns because the water has been treated at the conditioning plant. Part of the reason for treatment is because holding reservoirs pose a significant risk for contamination.
In my municipality there aren't enough cisterns that there's a significant risk of undetected damage, but larger cities, particularly with tall buildings, will have enough that contamination is able to go longer without detection. It's why major cities treat their water more aggressively.
Salt is poison. It's also a disinfectant antimicrobial. You also die unless you get a quantity of it.
Ethanol is a disinfectant poison, and so is lye/sodium hydroxide. Having a pretzel and a beer every now and then is also harmless, despite being cooked in disinfectant, topped with disinfectant, and washed down with yet another disinfectant.
You die unless you get enough water, and you die if you get too much.
Foxglove can kill you, or correct dangerous heart conditions.
Apples contain trace amounts of cyanide. Pears have formaldehyde in them because it's part of natural biological processes. (Your body actually has special processes for handling the formaldehyde it produces. You still shouldn't drink it, but pears are fine)
The dose makes the poison. That's not just a phrase meaning that sometimes you can avoid toxicity, it's quite literal. A poison is a chemical that disrupts normal bodily processes. Every chemical can do that with the correct (incorrect?) concentration.
If you choose to point to a chemical and say it shouldn't be consumed because there's a dose that can be harmful, it's worth remembering that every substance has that limit.
And that's the type of question you need to ask, not "is it poisonous at some dosage". You might be shocked to learn that that's actually part of what we look at when deciding if a chemical is safe to use in some context.
Also, I don't drink the pool water because it's a taboo in my culture to drink water that has had people in it. Doesn't mean it's unsafe to drink, since getting some in your mouth is inevitable when swimming. It's treated much more aggressively because "people are in it" and communal things like that are risks for disease spread.
Kinda like why I don't sterilize my scissors at home, but my barber does. The public health aspect is why they need a license and training that covers sanitation and the basics of skin diseases.
Also, the pool inevitably has pee in it. at a significantly higher concentration than the chlorine in drinking water, as an aside.
I feel like I was pretty resoundingly disputing that bit, because it's not a true statement. Concentration matters. A substance not being readily eliminated from the body is just one way for a concentration to become high enough to do harm.
Yes. Sometimes science misses an outcome. It's entirely about balancing risks with benefits. The risk of chlorine as a water additive is low, because we've studied it, there's no theoretical mechanism, and it's been in use for several generations with no ill effects. The benefits are cost effective clean drinking water.
There is nothing inaccurate about stating poison is poison. You're arguing the poison will not have an effect. That does not mean anything about its chemical structure or toxic properties have changed.
There is a reason the LD50 is listed. It shows a what concentration will kill a species of animal, usually mice. This is not entire analogous to humans but we accept this is the only practice that is maybe acceptable.
We do not test on humans and there is no blind study to show there are no longterm effects of consuming trace amounts of chlorine in water.
It's quite inaccurate to say that "poison is poison", because it's entirely a matter of the effect it has in the body. Is water poisonous? It doesn't take a huge amount to disrupt bodily functions and kill you. Ironically for the conversation, one of the key things disrupted by water poisoning is the balance of chlorine ions in nerves.
So is water poisonous even though we rarely consume it in toxic amounts?
Is chlorine not poisonous because we require a quantity of it to live?
Or, maybe, poison is better used for a substance that is or will cause disruption to functions if introduced to the body. A glass of water isn't poisonous, but a 5 gallon jug is. A full fox glove plant is poisonous, but a trace of the digitalis it contains is medicine.
I'm not sure why we would need a blind study of chlorine in water. We can just look at aggregate health trends in several populations. A blind is necessary when researchers are performing an intervention, but if you're not intervening you don't need one, just a way to deal with possible confounding variables. A typical one is "observational populations large enough to cover almost all variables", like you get by looking at population aggregated health data across entire countries.
It how we gauge the effectiveness of things like flossing and brushing your teeth where it's considered unethical to require a subject to forgo a procedure believed to be beneficial. It's not like you learn nothing just because your methodology didn't eliminate every confounder.
I already edited it to infamously anyways thats what comes to my mind at first when i think of chlorine.
And how would i propose we do this? By living in a country that already does it. Here is the page of my local water provider:
https://www.evides.nl/uw-drinkwater/productieproces/de-zuiveringsprocessen
So on whatever way the Netherlands does it seems to work out.
Being used to this type of water when i go on vacation it really smells like im drinking swimming pool water.
Didn't know anyone was doing it at scale. Neat.
In any case, retrofitting most municipal systems just to protect against a non-existent danger just isn't feasible.
Looking a bit more into the process in the Netherlands, it looks like it's not just UV light. It looks like it's also aggressive filtration, and treatment with lye and hydrogen peroxide. Also benign, but not quite in line with the "nothing that seems toxic in the water" story.
The Netherlands also chlorinates water, just not to the degree some other countries do. The chlorine is what keeps the water safe during transport and storage after it has been sterilized.
Ban sodium chloride too!
Is your argument that chlorine is as safe to consume as salt?
Are you claiming that chlorinated water is as dangerous as chlorine gas?
No, but i am saying i would rather not drink disinfectants.
Then enjoy waterborne diseases - apparently that’s preferable to chlorine concentrations of, at most, 4 parts per million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradiation
Does your tap have a UV light in it, or do you think there's no possibility of bacterial growth between the water processing plant and your house?
Stop being so negative. They’ve clearly given this a lot of thought. At least two to three seconds.
Yes it does
So then why do you care?
And how much did it cost?
And costs orders of magnitude more.
Using chlorine to treat drinking water is fine dude, just stop.
mustard gas is not the same as chlorinated water, or even bleach and ammonia. its a different compound.
Chlorine gas was actually used in world war 1. It's still a massive stretch to invoke that in relation to water treatment.
It's like invoking water boarding to say we shouldn't have a water supply.
I was not talking about Mustard gas but chlorine gas, according to wikipedia first deployed on masse during tbe Second battle of Ypres by the germans.