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Florida set to become second state to ban fluoride in public water
(www.nbcnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Ban chlorine and chloramine in the water too! The microorganisms will strengthen your immune system. Just like Haiti. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
You literally just proved my point. Congrats.
Maybe do like 5 min of research to learn how the treatment works and why it's completely safe?
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.
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
You actually fell for that? UV takes hours to kill any amount of microbes in numbers that could make you sick. That thing is doing nothing but costing you money.
Try this, get yourself a cheap microscope and run some pond water through that gizmo and see what you get out of a drop at the other end.
So then why do you care?
And how much did it cost?
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
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.