Topic: Chlorine Bleach in our Drinking Water: Not All Bleach is the Same

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    The Secret of Water

    Water should be pure and free of bad bacteria; it should bring us minerals, some oxygen, a proper magnetic polarization (to be discussed later) and it should even taste good. The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have shared the responsibility for good water quality and have done their utmost to keep it so.

    They could not prevent the universal contamination of our water with hundreds of solvents, metals, pesticides and other chemicals. They could not prevent the tragedy that we now see in an explosion of illnesses beginning in childhood.

    Yet, it is not these multiple contaminants that makes the difference we are searching for. These are present in most waters and consumed by most people. In spite of being undesirable, these do not make the decisive difference between immune system destruction or its preservation, between getting cancer or not.

    Water is usually treated with aluminum to help it filter clear of sediment as it is passed through sand beds. It is then disinfected with chlorine gas. This is done in nearly all water treatment plants. Chlorine gas bubbled through water produces assorted harmful and even carcinogenic chemicals, but, again, most people have been drinking such water and do not get cancer. After the water leaves the treatment plant it is tested for its "free" chlorine level at certain checkpoints, because this level tends to get lower and lower. A certain level needs to be kept up, about 1 part per million (ppm) of active chlorine. This is what kills bacteria. Little measuring kits for free chlorine can be bought at hardware stores and pool supply stores.

    Adding more chlorine gas on a small scale, if the free chlorine were low, would be prohibitively expensive at these numerous small checkpoints. Chlorine gas is also very dangerous to handle. Consequently, technicians have been trained to calculate how much liquid chlorine (bleach) needs to be added at any one checkpoint. This is much less expensive and dangerous. They have been taught which bleach has the EPA registration number and the National Standards Foundation (NSF) stamp to legalize its use in drinking water, and where to buy it. It comes in double strength concentration, large bottles, and 4 bottles to a crate, a most unwieldy package! It also comes in larger containers for manufacturer's use and other big consumers. A plastic crate is the only legal way to transport this rather hazardous fluid because it contains 12% chlorine instead of the 6% that we are accustomed to handling. The bottles must always be carried in this crate and returned that way, not suited to engineers and workmen who must often speedily repair some water department pipes.

    All the detailed requirements were expected to lead to a carefully protected process of adding a food-grade bleach to the public drinking water. But it did just the opposite.

    Somewhere a myth got started. It stated that "bleach is bleach" and any bleach would do. It would justify stopping at the corner store for a bottle of bleach. Before there were many kinds of bleach on the market, perhaps purer than now, such a myth did little harm. Now that many kinds of bleaches are on the market, it does a great deal of harm. The new bleaches arriving in the supermarkets in the past few decades have changed considerably. Some have "whiteners and brighteners" added. Many have other additives. It was already known generations ago that adding "bluing" to your laundry made it appear "whiter". Old-fashioned bluing was a cobalt compound, a heavy metal. Actually, current laundry bleaches have a huge assortment of dyes, and the heavy metals include barium, lead, lanthanum, nickel, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, ruthenium, and yttrium, for example. There is no set recipe for these, suggesting they are some other industry's wastewater. The dyes, too, are not fixed and could come from a textile manufacturer's effluent. They were never meant to be drunk only applied to clothing and bathrooms.

    The Syncrometer typically finds about 20 heavy metals in a sample of modern bleach. All have many azo dyes, asbestos, and shocking solvents. Shocking, because PCBs and benzene solvents are well known to cause cancer. Compare this to the legally designated, NSF-grade bleach (see table on page 12).

    Through a simple-minded error of using laundry bleach instead of NSF-grade bleach, your water can receive the stamp of cancer. Just which brand of bleach is being used can easily be discerned. Bleach varieties only resonate with themselves on the Syncrometero. So if you test water samples for the presence of local supermarket varieties of bleach, you can tell which one you are inadvertently drinking. You can also find which variety is used in your pool or spa and on the produce in your supermarket.

    Modern bleaches contain dyes. Being used for laundry, we could not expect these to be safe, edible dyes. The Syncrometer detects those already banned 50 years ago in food and some legally allowed, even now. They include Fast Garnet, Fast Green, Fast Red, Fast Red Violet, Fast Blue,

    Dimethylaminoazobenzene (DAB, or butter yellow), Sudan Black, in fact the entire list on page 603. Maybe they are simply pollutants of the major blue (for bluing) dyes used. Maybe they are the wastewater of a dye-making industry. I don't know the sources of these dye ingredients, the heavy metal ingredients.

    There are no strong pollution controls over a product like laundry bleach. The Syncrometer® finds PCBs and benzene in every bottle and asbestos in many, but not all.
    Plain motor oil and wheel bearing grease are also regularly present.

    Maybe all this does little harm rubbed against your skin (though perhaps it contributes to skin diseases) after doing the laundry. But added to your drinking water, these 5 toxins: PCBs, benzene, asbestos, heavy metals and azo dyes, together become the "fingerprint" of cancer. They will be in your saliva, lymph, cerebrospinal fluid, and tumors together.

    Legitimate food-grade bleach, the kind stamped with the NSF mark and given a registration number has none of these 5 categories

    The difference between these bleach varieties in your water makes the difference between those who get cancer and those who do not.

    Of course the FDA, EPA and Department of Agriculture who are in charge of disinfectants and sterilization methods cannot be expected to accept results obtained with a Syncrometer . The Syncrometer is not an FDA-approved device nor will it be for some time to come. Automation of the device must come first. The keen interest of our agencies would help to arrive at this.

    Regular analytical laboratory tests are approved and could be used by anybody to validate the Syncrometero results. I have already done this, finding the heavy metal analysis to be the most reproducible and least expensive. I recommend this test for anyone who gets cancer, or wishes to prevent it and wants to confirm the extraordinary heavy metals in their drinking water. See the list of laboratories on page 604.

    Testing for PCBs and benzene by labs is more expensive and much more unreliable than for metals. Often no results are obtained by a lab because of the tendency for grease to stick to the sides of the container. PCBs and benzene are greasy. They came with the motor oil and grease in the bleach. Just pouring out the water sample into the labs' own containers or sucking up a portion of it leaves these toxins behind! They miss being tested, especially when plastic bottles have been used in sampling. Grease sticks to the container the way it sticks to a dishpan if no soap is used.

    Asbestos and azo dyes cannot be tested at all because no commercial labs have been found that can do this. Even research labs can only detect asbestos spears above a certain (10 micron) length. Most asbestos in water is shorter than this and gets missed. When a pollutant gets missed, it ruins the epidemiological study. Even the short asbestos bits are easily found by Syncrometer . The smaller spears are probably the most harmful ones because they can be eaten whole by your white blood cells. The number of longer spears allowed is 7 million per quart!

    In spite of these difficulties some simple tests can be done by anyone to test for laundry bleach in their water. Since PCBs and benzene are in grease and oil, they slowly rise to the top of standing water and can be seen and felt as a greasy film. But great care must be taken to sample the water carefully and to view the surface correctly. If only one day's water sample is used, you could miss the results completely as would happen if a commercial or official lab were to come to test your water.

    Bleach is added to your drinking water intermittently, according to "need". Often it is once a week. So you should sample your water for 7 days in a row to be sure you are testing the bleach addition in a meaningful way. See details on page 579.

    The 5 toxin categories occur together in the popular bleach varieties. If you find grease in your water you will find all 5 toxin categories, too, if you are testing by Syncrometer . You can then assume it is not NSF-bleach that was used in your water and that you do have laundry bleach water. Hurry to correct this! In a cancer patient, the body has reached its limit of detoxifying ability and these toxins stand out clearly, including the bleach brand, because they have been accumulating in you. In healthy people, maybe none will be seen since they are actively detoxified by the body or stored in a future tumor.

    All the cancer patients seen in the last 5 years, including many not seen but merely tested had these 5 toxins and a popular laundry bleach variety in their drinking water. The same set was seen in their saliva, lymph, organs, and tumors. This comes to a very large number of patients, possibly a thousand. Not a single cancer case was missing this "laundry bleach fingerprint" in their bodies. But a few patients had the evidence only in their tumors or lymph, not saliva. These persons had recently moved to a new home and luckily found good water. Cancer victims in Europe showed a different brand of laundry bleach I have named European laundry bleach. This is particularly high in azo dyes, motor oil and wheel bearing grease, but without PCBs and benzene. The manufacturing plant given for it was American. Cancer victims in Central America, India, UK, and all HIV victims in Africa showed the same bleach brands as in the USA. Victims in Mexico showed a Mexican brand of bleach with the USA brand included.

    There were no exceptions among cancer patients, making this a compelling statistic. Of course, family members of cancer victims may not have cancer yet although they are using the same water. Their risk is much higher than others but maybe they will move away before it happens. Moving to a residence in a clean-water district should and does remove the risk of cancer developing. Now it is understandable how a parent with cancer could raise a family where only some children get cancer. They all moved to different residences. It only takes a few weeks to lower the level of all these toxins in your body if you are still healthy. Each patient seen by us was asked to obtain water samples from friends and relatives until a clean-water district was found. Judging by such water samples there are about as many water departments using the legitimate bleach as using the wrong bleach. This ratio was much better just 5 years ago. The bad bleach habit is spreading.

    Why is bad bleach used? Because of the myth, no doubt. Maybe convenience and cost are considered. The answer is not known.

    As thorough and demanding as our regulatory agencies have been with water regulations, the control has not extended to the end­of-the-line processes. Which grade bleach to use for periodically cleaning the small tank where bleach and water -are premixed before pumping it to the large tank, which oil and grease to use for the pumps themselves and which kinds of pumps to use are not specified. And which bleach to use when repairing water pipes and digging wells is not specified. Nor is it specified when giving cautionary advice about cutlery, kitchen counters and sinks. It is human nature to reach for the quickest, easiest, cheapest brands of bleach. Our agencies have trusted the water departments' GMP (good manufacturing practice) for all these details. We must not trust any department, regardless of its good intentions. They mean no harm, certainly, but drinking water must be guarded to the very last detail of its delivery process. Good to the last drop must be literally interpreted. The record of procedure must be provable in detail with a log, dated and signed, as for any manufacturing business. Now it is not.

    Thank you, Syncrometer , now we know the problem.

    From: "The Prevention of all Cancers", page 8-17; Copyright notice)

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