Okay. So that we can get this out of the way, yes, chlorine is a deadly gas. It is water soluble (it can dissolve into water). It combines with sodium to create table salt.
So why do we use chlorine?
I'm getting to that.
This is a list of alternative treatments for drinking water. Now, stay with me here. I'm not just dismissing chlorine from the picture. The reason the government doesn't switch from chlorine is for one of two reasons:
one: The alternative method is just not as good/safe.
two: The alternative method costs too much/takes too much time.
Yes, believe it or not, there really are alternatives out there that are MORE DANGEROUS than chlorine. I don't have a source for it (because I FORGOT to get it before I closed out of it.....), but there are actually some methods that cause more outbreaks of cancer than chlorine.
Now, there's your little background introduction. On to the meat of this post:
The recommended amount of chlorine in your water is .3-.5 mg per liter, which coverts into roughly 1.14ish-1.89 milligrams per gallon of water. Which means that for every gallon of water you drink, you ingest roughly anywhere from 1 to 2 milligrams of chlorine.
Okay, so instead of finding a statistic for how much in GALLONS you should drink daily, I've found liters. All the information above is pretty much true, though, so that still stands. But anyways, here's the deal: according to this reliable source (I don't trust the media as much as I probably should...), the "institute of medicine," which is what CNN calls it, recommends that men drink 3 liters of water and women drink 2.2 liters of water daily. Assuming we aren't all Boy Scouts (who actually advise that you drink water CONSTANTLY), and instead that we drink less than we should, we'll go with an average estimate of 2.0 liters every day. That's anywhere in between .6 and 1 milligram a day.
Now. Say we take any old person, average height, average weight. They exercise regularly, they're fairly healthy. They've been drinking 2 liters of tap water every day since they were 14, and they died at around....say.....80 years old. They started on the DAY OF their 14th birthday, and stopped the DAY OF their 80th birthday. That's roughly 24,106 days (accounting for leap year), and roughly 48,213 liters of water. That turns into anywhere from 14,464 to 24,107 milligrams of chlorine over 66 years, or about 14.5 to 24 grams of chlorine that your system ingests over a period of 66 years.
There are 301,140,000-ish people in America, statistic taken from Google. That means that 301.14 KILOS are ingested a day.
Just so you know, 301.14 kilos is enough to kill 94 million kittens.
(edit: source; measurement for guinea pigs is used for kittens)
Actually, that statistic is really REALLY made up. However, you *could* probably kill upwards of 50 million kittens with 301.14 kg of Chlorine.
Now, consider this: the low lethal dosage (LCLo) of chlorine for humans is rougly 25 grams. (source). Also, note that we didn't cover exactly how much water you drink in the first 14 years of your life: a considerable amount.
Anyways, here's another little *interesting* statistic I just picked up: "Magnesium Corp. of America released 42 million lb of Cl2 into the skies of Utah's West Desert in 2000, about 90% of the U.S. total for that year." (source). Which means the total is closer to 46.6 million pounds. Which is 21 million kilos. That's 8300395260 people you could kill if you really really tried.
To wrap up everything above, chlorine is terrible for you. Phenomenally bad for you. You ingest mass amounts of it over your lifetime.
However, it's a lot better than ingesting a slew of pathogens and bacteria and dying.
There is something that you can do about chlorine, however: let me encourage you to buy a water filter. It usually manages to take out almost all the chlorine, and plus it gives you even cleaner water than everyone else will be drinking if they didn't have a water filter.
Hope you enjoyed that little rant thing I gave.
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