Mercury seems to do a good job

salts of chlorine are necessary for human health. elemental chlorine is tolerated by the body fairly well in small amounts. the key is this - Iodine liquifies fat, chlorine solidifies it.

hydrogenation, anyone?

http://www.orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2000/articles/2000-v15n02-p089.shtml


Possible Artery Damage

When chlorinated water is run through a hose or carried in a pail followed by milk as in a dairy, “very tenacious, yellowish deposits chemically similar to arterial plaque” form; with unchlorinated water this doesn’t happen.2

CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” show July 11, 1992, displayed two laboratory rats, both of them eating standard rat chow and drinking chlorinated water. One rat was also on pasteurized, homogenized milk. When the animals were sacrificed, the arteries of the milk-drinking rats were found to be clogged.

Dairy buckets, hoses and rats’ arteries resist the arterial-wall damage known as atherosclerosis. But what can chlorinated water and cow milk, particularly homogenized milk, do to the far more susceptible arteries of humans? Those of young chickens are about as susceptible to such damage as human arteries. As a first approximation, J.M. Price, MD, gave cockerels (roosters less than a year old) only chlorinated water (without milk). They developed arterial plaques; and the stronger the concentration of chlorine, the faster and worse the damage. Cockerels on unchlorinated water developed no such damage.2

The residents of the small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, had no heart attacks despite a diet rich in saturated animal fats and milk–until they moved away from Roseto’s mountain spring water and drank chlorinated water. After that, consuming the same diet, they had heart attacks.2 The Roseto example is dramatic enough but the needed detailed comparisons and follow-up have never been done.

How closely does the incidence of heart attacks match the areas where, and times when water is chlorinated? Chlorination spread throughout America in the second and third decades of this century, about 20 years before the increase of heart attacks. Light chlorination yielded slow growth of plaques in Price’s cockerels, therefore, chlorination of people’s drinking water at the usual low concentration might have been expected to take at least 10-20 years to produce clinical manifestations of atherosclerosis.

A physician team led by William F. Enos autopsied 300 GIs who had died in battle in the Korean War. These men, who had passed induction examination as healthy, averaged 22.1 years of age. To their shock and amazement, in 77percent of the 300 the pathologists found “gross evidence of arteriosclerosis in the coronary arteries.” In several, one or more heart arteries were partly or completely occluded.3 Although Enos didn’t try to explain his grisly discovery, he assumed arterial clogging had developed gradually. Seeming to support that assumption, almost 20 years later pathologists discovered early arterial damage in 96 percent of nearly 200 consecutive babies who had died from various causes in their first month outside the womb. Two of those babies’ coronary arteries were blocked, causing infantile heart attacks.4 Identified as crib deaths, these were related to functionally deficient vitamin B6.5

But did arterial damage in fact develop slowly? The water that the American soldiers had to drink in Korea was so heavily chlorinated that many could hardly tolerate it. In Vietnam, too, autopsies of American solders found heart artery damage.6 Again, water supplied to them had been heavily chlorinated.2 Did much of the soldiers’ arterial damage develop not gradually but quickly as in Dr. Price’s cockerels? The truth–slow or rapid development of clogging–may never be known. Interestingly, from 1950 to 1965 while heart attacks increased, on a population level arterial lesions did not increase;7 the major growth was in clotting.

from earthclinic

MORE ABOUT Iodine DEFICIENCY CAUSED BY table salt

"J.C. Jarvis, M.D. author of Folk Medicine was particularly fond of Iodine replacement due to the chorine content of our drinking water. He writes: "The clinical activity of any one of these four halogens is in inverse proportion to its atomic weight. This means that any one of the four can displace the element with a higher atomic weight, but cannot displace an element with a lower atomic weight. For example, flourine can displace chlorine, bromine and Iodine because flourine has a lower atomic weight than the other three. Similarly, chlorine can displace bromine and iodine because they both have a higher atomic weight. Likewise, bromine can displace iodine from the body because iodine has a higher atomic weight. But a reverse order is not possible. A knowledge of this well-known chemical law brings us to a consideration of the addition of chlorine to our drinking water as a purifying agent. We secure a drinking water that is harmful to the body not because of its harmful germ content but because the chlorine content now causes the body to lose the much-needed iodine..." -- (Folk Medicine, Henry Holt & Co., 1958, HB, p. 136)