Eli5 if chlorine is toxic how come it doesn’t harm me in swimming pools?
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Chlorine is present even in tap water you drink. It’s toxic in large amounts, but both tap water and pool water cointain only small amounts of it that are toxic to bacteria, but not humans.
If you start drinking pool water, it will certainly make you ill.
If you go to an indoor wave pool that’s highly chlorinated you may pick up a nasty cough.
Chlorine in pools is kept at a low enough concentration that it doesn’t harm your skin, but a higher concentration certainly would.
Our skin protects us from the harm the chlorine would cause. Both chlorine and soap work by ripping open the cell membrane, killing bacteria and disabling viruses. Human skin is composed of many later of dead skin cells with tightly compacted proteins holding them together, forming a barrier against the outside. This si why you don’t dissolve you own hands when you wash them with soap!
It does harm you. Not in any dangerous way, but for example causing irritation and redness of your eyes.
It’s the dose that makes any substance a poison. Chlorine bleach is extremely effective even at low concentrations. You could add a tiny amount to disinfect drinking water, and drink it before it had decomposed and evaporated off.
Everything is toxic in the right dose. Just as anything is safe in the right dose. It’s always this.
It’s because of the amount you are in
If I take 1 glass of water and put 1 tbsp of salt in it then you would probably taste the salt. If I take 10 gallons of water and put 1 tbsp of salt in it you would either not taste it or it would be tasted a lot less. As it would be diluted and have less salt particles per million water particles
**ELI5**
Bananas are toxic, they contain arsenic.
But you’ve had bananas before. Right?
There’s so LITTLE arsenic in bananas that it doesn’t kill you.
There’s so LITTLE chlorine in a pool that it doesn’t kill you.
It is very diluted and you are relatively big. It is still harmful to small things like germs (that’s the whole point of using it) but you are big enough that its not as harmful to you.
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