Nobody wants to think of their kids taking in sips full of toxic water. But a new study says all the disinfectants we've been using to keep our drinking and swimming water clean may be doing just the opposite.
The ten-year study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency found that disinfectants mixing with organic matter in our water to create "disinfectant by-products" (DBP) with some pretty risky consequences.
"Some of these are toxic, some can cause birth defects, some are
genotoxic, which damage DNA, and some we know are also carcinogenic," geneticist Michael Plewa said in HSDailyWire.com.
The scary part, as we head into summer, is the significant amount of DBPs found in swimming pools, where Plewa says body hair, urine (we all know kids pee in the pool) and other bits of human mix with the disinfectants in the pool. Because poolwater is generally recycled, Plewa says the concentration of DBPs in a swimming pool is tenfold what it is in drinking water. And babies, whose parents love to take them into the pool to escape the summer heat, are more susceptible than any of us to the damaging affects of DBPs.
So what can you do? Stay out of public pools - where people are doing all kinds of nasty. Stick your kids in fresh disinfectant-free water in a baby wading pool (and keep a VERY close eye on them), and wait until scientists come up with some new wonder product. . . which they'll find out twenty years down the line also causes cancer, but hey, what we don't know won't kills us. Right?
Image: ScienceDaily
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