So I’ve been poking around investigating various additives that can be put into a swimming pool and I came across “chlorine stabilizer” and I start thinking “chemically what the heck would stabilize chlorine?”
Well it turns out that they use a close relative of melamine called cyanuric acid.
Remember melamine and poisoning our pets with contaminated pet food? Well cyanuric acid was a component of that poisoning. Turns out that melamine isn’t all that toxic by itself but when present with cyanuric acid causes fatal kidney damage.
OMG! Flip that around in your head. Say Cyanuric acid is not toxic except when combined with melamine. What the …. What other chemicals might cyanuric acid combine with to produce toxic results. And that’s just chemically.
Absorbing energy from sunlight could make it even more reactive/toxic. It took me a half hour of sniffing, but I finally found an absorption spectra for cyanuric acid. It absorbs in the UV wavelengths, binds to chlorine, and probably chemically shades the chlorine somewhat from ultraviolet radiation.
We have no clue as to what cyanuric acid might be doing with the ultraviolet light energy that it absorbs. The work I did getting my doctorate degree was investigating UV phototoxins and DNA damage.
A Phototoxin absorbs light energy, and then transmits that energy to the cell. Copper is a known phototoxin but even so it is often used in swimming pools. I have wondered in other links snake oil and copper-based-algaecides who in their right mind would promote adding a phototoxin to to an area where we regularly congregate _mostly on bright sunny days_???
The copper, and potentially the cyanuric acid pool stabilizer, dry on our skin after swimming. This increases the concentration and enhances the phototoxicity. Excellent idea don’t you all think.
Okay we don’t know all there is to know about a natural pond either but we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years around it as opposed to chlorine with stabilizer added to it. Just sayin’
:-) the best to everyone, and just a suggestion to all the smart ones out there, try to avoid all the toxic chemicals in your own living space as well.
Bob