In 1832, there was a cholera epidemic. Thousands of new cases each week and hundreds of deaths. When it hit Paris alone, tens of thousands of people died. To qu

In 1832, there was a cholera epidemic. Thousands of new cases each week and hundreds of deaths. When it hit Paris alone, tens of thousands of people died. To quote a former mayor of New York at the time: > Our visitation is severe but thus far it falls much short of other places. St. Louis on the Mississippi is likely to be depopulated, and Cincinnati on the Ohio is awfully scourged. Over a hundred thousand people fled urban areas to live in the countryside to escape cholera. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans died of the disease. Our former president, James Polk, succumbed to the disease. Almost a quarter million Mexicans died. Millions of people contracted cholera around the world and hundreds of thousands of them died. We don't really have cholera anymore. Fewer than forty cases have been reported in the US each year for the last fifty years or so. This is largely due to our ability to treat water. You know who doesn't have treated water? The Democratic Republic of Congo. Ever hear about the water crisis in Africa? Tens of thousands of people contract cholera there (among other other diseases) each year, and a good chunk of them die. > Transparency drives technological evolution, if the tradeoff is known and can be argued to be problematic there is an incentive to come up with a better solution. Drinking untreated groundwater is not the answer, and not innovative in any way. It's regressionist. Encouraging other people to do it with promises of potential health benefits is ignoring our relatively recent past, where literally millions of people died because we didn't have clean tap water. Perhaps we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, not having to worry about dying from terrible waterborne diseases. Also, fluoridated water doesn't decrease your IQ [0], and claiming it does is irresponsible. [0] https://www.snopes.com/water-fluoridation-reduces-iq/ https://www.snopes.com/water-fluoridation-reduces-iq/