I am returning from a bit of training in overseas environmental assessment. The company I work for has a contract to visit governmental installations and audit their environmental compliance. The installations are required to adhere to all national and host nation environmental regulations. Where there are differing regulations, they must meet the more stringent of the two. Fine, not a problem. However, there are a few areas where it isn’t a case of degree, but direction. Two cases come to mind, both from Germany.
First, we (Americans) tend to add chlorine to drinking water - cleans up bacteria, makes it safer for us to drink. The Germans, on the other hand, think we are nuts. Why take perfectly good water and add a poison? In addition, chlorine can combine with things to make some pretty nasty stuff.
Second is radon. We loathe the stuff. Test our homes and slash the resale value if we find it seeping in. Monitor levels for one to three years if it is detected. Yuck. The Germans, however, pay money to sit in a cave full of the stuff. Something to do with the small amount of damage it does to their lungs making them stronger in the long run. (Maybe they should take up smoking?)
Both chlorine and radon are outside my area of expertise (notice I didn’t say I actually had an area… but I still sound like an expert on something) What’s the Straight Dope.? Radon, chlorine… yea or nay?
Note: This isn’t my area of expertise, either, but that’s not stopping me from posting
The amount of chlorine in US tap water is small enough to be considered harmless, but it saves lots of lives/medical costs by killing harmful bacteria. There are other ways to accomplish the same thing, but they’re generally more unsafe or ridiculously expensive. I’d be curious to see how Germany deals with bateria in their water. Of course, if the water is “perfectly good”, you wouldn’t need to add anything, but how do you get the water “perfectly good” to start with? Water right out of the ground isn’t necessarily safe, even though it’s “natural”.
Radon is just plain bad for you, although I believe the EPA levels for homes are lower than they need to be. Radon exposure increases the odds lung cancer (just how much varies with the person), so the damage for a particular person is either none whatsoever, or they get lung cancer. I don’t see getting cancer a “small price to pay” for making me “stronger.” I suppose you could argue that in the aggregate, if only a few people in Germany get lung cancer from it, and the rest are made “stronger”, you’d have a net gain, but I’d hate to be one of the unlucky ones. Is there any rationale or explanation for how it supposedly makes you “stronger”?
The key is the dose. Small doses of either is not fatal. Large doses of either is fatal. But assuming the doses are equivolent, then there are acute and chronic considerations. I think a large dose of chlorine would kill faster than a large dose of radon.
Having said that…
That sitting in the cave thing sounds like psuedoscientific garbage. I’ve never heard of any health benefits from radon. As an alpha emitter, radon will continue to irradiate lung tissue (if inhaled)…probably resulting in a cancerous tumor if given enough time. Outside the body, radon is fairly harmless because the alpha particles cannot penetrate our skin.
Chlorine (Cl2) is poisonous, but it has been incredibly beneficial for disinfecting drinking water. In this case, it’s a matter of weighing the long-term risks of drinking small amounts of chlorine and its byproducts vs. the short-term risks of drinking bacteria/virus-laden water. (re: byproducts…chlorine rapidly combines with organic molecules…by the time the water reaches your tap, most of the free chlorine is gone…but some of the byproducts are potential carcinogens). There are other ways to disinfect drinking water, but they are not as effective.
note: the element chlorine (Cl) is a necessary element for life (different than Cl2 even though the name is the same)
IIRC, most European countries use ozonation to disinfect their water supply. It is initially as effective as chlorine at disinfecting, and has the side benefit of not being present in the water when it comes out of the tap in your home (ozone is not stable). The main drawback is that it is not present in the water when it comes out of the tap in your home. Since the ozone does not make the trip from treatment plant to tap, it is not available to kill any harmful microbes in the pipes if they happen to get introduced through a leak or crack in a pipe. I think ozonation is comparable in price to chlorination, but I’m not sure on that.
Chlorination does have the drawback of having the potential to form chlorinated hydrocarbons in the water supply. If the water treatment plant does its job properly, there is not going to be much to worry about here (not to say that the risk is non-existant). If you have PVC plumbing in your home (on the supply side of the tap, not the drain), the risk from the PVC plumbing giving off chlorinated hydrocarbons is greater. If you are worried about the possible consumption of chlorinated hydrocarbons from either source, the easiest things you can do to minimize your risk are to get yourself an activated charcoal filter, or simply let your water run until it is cool coming out of the tap on days when it is hot outside. Why let your water run? You are going to have the largest chlorinated hydrocarbon contamination problem when the water is allowed to sit hot in the pipes in your attic. The attic is hot in the summer, and if you have PVC supply lines, this is the time when most of the chlorinated hydrocarbons will be released into the water from the pipes. It is also the point at which most of the reactions will occur between the chlorine and hydrocarbons that may already be present in the water. Remember, these chemical reactions will occur much more quickly when they are heated. So…Let the water run until you have fresh water coming out of the tap (you know it is fresh because it is cool). The advantage to chlorination is just the opposite of the drawback of ozonation. That is, the chlorine (well, most of it anyway) makes it from treatment to tap, and thus is available to kill any microbes that may be introduced into the water supply between the treatment plant and your home.
As for the radon? Hmmmm… I don’t know… Tiny exposures are not going to be that bad for you, but are they actually going to be good for you? I seriously doubt it. Our body has no use for radon, and if you buy into the theory that damaging your lungs a little bit will make them stronger (which I also doubt), there’s got to be a better way. Perhaps, as you suggested, they should take up smoking. Maybe smoke a pack per year. I have a feeling that there is someone over in Germany who has mastered the art of keeping a straight face while people pay him so that he will allow them to… sit.
Steve-o is right about ozone. The main advantage to using ozone rather than chlorine in the early years was that chlorine left a bad taste in the water (this defect has mostly been overcome). Ozone not only leaves no bad taste, it also neutralizes bad odors and tastes already present in the water. In those rare instances when Europeans do chlorinate water, they are always careful to dechlorinate it (with sodium hyposulfite) before sending it through the pipes.
ref: Ozone Chemistry and Technology American Chemical Society, 1959.
As for radon, I remember a study that came out around 1994 that claimed that non-smokers who are exposed to moderate doses of radon have a lower death rate than non-smokers who are exposed either to low or high doses of radon. The hypothesis was that exposure to moderate levels of radon somehow boosts the immune system. Most radon studies appear to consider only cancer deaths, but this one considered deaths from all causes. As I recall, smokers don’t receive any benefit from moderate doses of radon. I read about this study in the Wall Street Journal (around 1994), not a crackpot source. I haven’t heard anything about it since, and I can’t find anything about on the web. This is not the sort of study you’ll hear about from sellers of radon test kits or radon-mitigation services.
I wonder if the European aversion to chlorinated water might have anything to do with their grandfathers telling them about the chlorine gas they choked on at the Somme and Flanders Field. Just idle speculation. BTW, do they also have anything against mustard on their hot dogs?
I’ve said this before, but never rely on the popular press for science news. In general, someone will come out with some preliminary result, they publish it in the scientific press, others try to replicate the effect, they either succeed or fail, and also publish their results in the journals, either way. This is how the system works. What the popular press does, is pick up on preliminary results that they think will interest their readership, and publish immediately. They don’t wait for followup studies, and when the followup studies inevitably do occur, they don’t pick up on them. If you don’t want to plunk down the cash for a personal subscription to The New England Journal of Medicine or whatever (don’t blame you; they’re mighty pricy), you’re well-advised to at least go with magazines dedicated to science, like Scientific American. These will usually wait a bit more before releasing the information, and if new evidence comes up, they’ll mention it. Another possibility is talking to someone who works in the field-- Your local university should be a help here, as is this message board.
One time I was entertaining some clients from England, Amsterdam, and Portugal in the Arizona Center in Phoenix (where they have many outdoor fountains). As we sat down to eat, they made a show of sniffing, and then one exclaimed “Good Lord! You chlorinate the water in the fountains? Why?”
I couldn’t smell a thing (I can smell swimming pool water though), but the scent was strong enough for them that we moved to a further table.
They good-naturedly accused Americans of being “wimps” because our immune systems were so weak, we had to chlorinate our water. I replied that no, Europeans were weak, because they would not last in the toxic wasterland of the future, and that our high chlorine levels were training us to survive in a post-industrial chemical holocaust.
And a good laugh was had by all.
The WSJ is admittedly less of a crackpot source than USA Today (which has run many perpetual motion machine articles over the last couple years with the premise “I don’t know, could be true…”). However, it still caters to a public that doesn’t care about such “issues” as irreproducible results, sample size not representative of the population, measurement error, statistical skewing, personal bias by the researchers. The public says “oh, some researcher at the University of Assboink said pork makes you smarter. That’s good enough for me!”
The chlorine/ozone thing seems to be well covered but there is more to say about radon I think:
“The Germans, however, pay money to sit in a cave full of the stuff [radon].”
Americans used to do that too. (Maybe some still do.)
“I don’t think there’s any proof of any statistically significant health problems from normal radon.”
This is the big question. There is no doubt that exposure to high levels of radioactive materials such as radon can kill you. The big argument is whether there is a threshold for harm; that is, whether exposure to tiny amounts of radon just does a tiny amount of harm or whether it does zero harm.
Of course, even if it does a tiny amount of harm, there is still the question of what you should do about it. For example, if the radon in your basement is increasing your chances of dying of lung cancer from 1.0 in one thousand to 1.001 in one thousand (a “statistically significant” difference if enought people are studied), should you spend $2000 on radon abatement? This is a question of values, not facts, and science can’t help you with it.
