THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF ALLERGIES: THE WATER SUPPLY
Water is something we all take in, every day. It is obvious that the quality of that water will have a bearing on health and well-being. To prevent the spread of infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, our cities began adding the chemical chlorine to the drinking water in 1912.
Chlorine was admirably effective in stopping the spread of infection. But, as a historian of this topic notes, “In discovering that drinking water could be purified by different filters, and made doubly safe through chlorination, interest in pollution declined.”6 Thus, there was very little reaction when two allergists, S. H. Watson and C. S. Kibler, showed, in 1934, that chlorinated drinking water could cause asthma in certain susceptible individuals.7
Chlorine is, in fact, a common cause of symptoms in individuals who are generally susceptible to chemicals. For this reason, in my special diagnosis and treatment facility, the Ecology Unit (Chap. 17), patients are given spring water to drink and treat chlorinated tap water as a “suspect” beverage. Some patients also react to swimming in chlorinated pools or even breathing their vapors. Some people are made sick by standing over a tub of steaming water in a closed bathroom. The contribution of fluoridation to this problem has simply not been studied adequately to permit us to make any definite statements about it.
In some parts of the country, the water is very “hard” (that is, saturated with mineral salts) and difficult to use in washing. There is a tendency in these areas to soften all water entering the kitchen or the laundry room with chemical water softeners. This is one of the built-in hazards of present-day home construction. If the softened water is drunk, it is apparently tolerated by many but a minority may become highly susceptible and be made ill by it.
The solution is to use softened water for all other purposes, but only unsoftened water for drinking and cooking. This requires having an extra tap in the kitchen. Some patients have a separate tap of unsoftened and filtered water, which is the only kind they use for internal consumption.
Even a “safe” source of water can easily become polluted. Certain wells, known to have been approved for use by chemically susceptible persons at one time, have since become chemically contaminated, as judged by several patients with this type of problem who are no longer able to use waters from such sources. The same holds true for several recently diagnosed patients.
Ideally, drinking waters should be rotated in the same way as foods. Of the recently hospitalized patients whom we have tested, approximately 70 percent reacted to one or several of the seven different waters which we routinely employed in testing. As with foods, a currently tolerated water may eventually become the source of individual reactions at some later time, especially if it is abused. Unfortunately, water rotation often is not practicable, since many locations lack an adequate variety of water supplies.
It should be said in summary that, as with other aspects of the food and chemical susceptibility problem, no two patients are found to have exactly the same water problem. For instance, there is no readily available water which seems to agree with all chemically susceptible patients, and a water which is agreeable to one person may be a major cause of symptoms in another. In short, the water problem remains not only highly individualized, but is also a common cause of persistent unexplained symptoms in otherwise controlled patients.
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