- About CEI - Support CEI Rachel's Folly: The End of Chlorine
Rachel's Folly: The End of Chlorine February 29, 1996 The
environmentalists are right about one thing: Dirty water kills.
Millions are people are dying needlessly all over the world
because of it. But are the main culprits man-made pollution and
chlorinated chemicals? Try endemic poverty, bad plumbing and
lack of access to basic water chlorination techniques. Every
year, nearly 1.5 billion people -- mostly children under five --
suffer from preventable water-borne diseases such as cholera,
typhoid fever, amoebic dysentery, bacterial gastroenteritis,
giardiasis, schistosomiasis, and various viral diseases such as
hepatitis A. Yet now there is a mounting campaign, led by
environmental activists in wealthy industrialized nations, to
eliminate every last man-made chlorine molecule from the face of
the earth. Greenpeace, the international environmental advocacy
group, launched the first salvo in 1991 with its call to phase
out completely “the use, expor