[solofounder7]

I'm a hacker not a doctor but I've done some research into water purification, and here is what I've learned:

The body is mostly water. The task of removing microorganisms and fungus from water has been well studied.

Science knows of effective agents which are proven to purify water of micro-organisms like bacteria and also fungus. Some of these are being utilized in public water decontamination, and others while also effective are not used because they are less cost efficient to produce.

Water purifying agents have a varying range of effectiveness and also and a varying range of toxicity to the human body. There are a couple of agents in particular however which are both well tolerated by the body and are also remarkably effective at decontaminating water.

The one which my research indicates leads the pack in this area is a white crystalline salt named Potassium Iodide, KI. KI has been used widely by both the military and by campers in portable water decontamination.

A solution of Potassium Iodide in water (known colloquially as Iodine) was a leading and apparently very effective drug during the 19th century in the United States. There are doctors today who prescribe milligram doses of KI (many many times more than the RDA) to treat a wide array of ailments but especially in dermatology. They do not typically see serious side effects although they do frequently recommend monitoring thyroid levels while utilizing higher doses.

[cstross]

"Airliners are mostly aluminum. Aluminum has well-understood properties, including flight. So if an airliner stops flying we can fix it by filtering out whatever impurity was responsible."

Sounds nonsensical to you? Good. Because that's about how reasonable your "the body is mostly water" thesis sounds to someone with a biomedical background.

[manarth]

This argument seems to be that "The body is mostly water. The task of removing X from water has been well studied. Therefore it's easy to remove X from the body". This seems to be a logical fallacy.

Let me rephrase this argument as: "The body is mostly water. The task of removing HIV from water has been well studied. Therefore it's easy to remove HIV from the body".

Just to be clear: I have no medical expertise, this is mere conjecture. But fungal infections could perhaps persist in various cells. In neurons. In spoor form. In all sorts of manifestations, where they wouldn't be affected by the same treatment that disinfects water. I don't have any expertise to say one way or the other, but I suspect that if there were a simple solution such as "just treat with Iodine, it'll kill the fungus", this discussion wouldn't be taking place.

[kibibu]

A quick injection of Easy Off Bam! Mould Killer should fix 'em right up.

[hamami]

you cannot just decontaminate your body, the human body relies on beneficial microorganisms to function. without them you'd die

[solofounder7]

Remarkably KI is gentle on the body while still doing a great job purifying water of the most common foul bacteria and fungus.

This seems like it would make no sense until you stop to consider that idea that in earlier generations of man we ate on average a lot more marine plants than we do today (kelp in particular) which are rich in Potassium Iodide. People ate kelp because it was a "low hanging fruit" so to speak, easily harvested in great quantity from the sea. Perhaps the beneficial organisms in our gut evolved to tolerate KI so that populations could tolerate eating mostly seaweed.

The Japanese still eat a lot of kelp (the average japanese male ingests more than 40mg of KI daily from seaweed), and if you crunch the statistics it looks like they may have significantly less AD among their population than we do in the west: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimers...

[gus_massa]

Not everybody lived nearby a sea. My family is from the north west of Argentina (Jujuy). To reach the sea you have to travel a few hundred kilometers horizontally and more than one kilometer vertically, so bringing anything from the sea was very expensive.

Moreover, the iodine content of the food was very low and that's bad for your thyroid. The government mandate to add a small amount of KI to the table salt NaCl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency

[kragen]

Potassium iodide is not iodine; it is a compound of iodine, with the same relation to iodine that table salt (sodium chloride) has to chlorine gas, which is a chemical weapon. In fact, both potassium iodide and sodium chloride are alkali halides, compounds of the halogens iodine and chlorine, respectively. Iodine is extremely reactive and consequently toxic, not only to people, but even more so to bacteria, which is why it is useful in disinfecting water. Tincture of iodine typically contains both potassium iodide and elemental iodine, but it's the elemental iodine that does the work.

Iodine, on contact with electron donors, will rapidly reduce them and ionize to the same nontoxic iodide found in potassium iodide, rendering it nearly harmless. However, oxidizing your body cells causes chemical burns by killing them; oxidizing bacteria and fungi kills their cells too. Pure iodine will blister your skin on contact.

Essentially your optimism arises from confusing two related, but very different, substances. Don't feel bad; I've made similar errors any number of times. One out of every ten thousand times that you think you've found an easy way to hack around a difficult and important problem, it's a breakthrough. The other 9,999 times, you're overlooking a fundamental reason your idea won't work.

It's deeply unfortunate that HN is not the kind of place that people will correct your mistakes, as I've done above, instead of silently downvoting you.

If you are using CNS stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidate, modafinil, cocaine, maybe even caffeine) you might want to cut down your dosage. The hyperfocus they facilitate can be counterproductive when it causes you to overlook your errors and get overexcited over a possible breakthrough. This can blossom into full-blown amphetamine psychosis, which is not an experience I recommend, especially for the people around you.

A useful tool in discovering errors like this is investigating consequences that would ensue should your reasoning turn out to be true. For example:

* Potassium iodide is a chemical that people have been dosed with many times, including soldiers under controlled conditions. If it cured everything from jock itch to acute bacterial meningitis, probably someone would have noticed.

* Bottles of iodine are labeled "for external use only". If it were nontoxic, it would not be labeled in this way.

* Many potassium iodide vendors and customers are enthusiastic promoters of colloidal silver, which actually is a broad-spectrum antimicrobial that is fairly nontoxic to human bodies. (By itself, it's not effective enough to disinfect water with, but in combination with the more toxic copper, ionized silver has been used to disinfect water.) If KI were effective for disinfection, they would be promoting it as such.

* Our bodies use iodide in certain thyroid hormones, so there are enzymes devoted to moving iodide ions around, keeping them from reacting with the wrong things, etc. This is different from e.g. lead, mercury, or tellurium, which have no known biological function and cause toxicity by acting as poor substitutes for other atoms. If iodide were nontoxic and effective at stopping fungal infections, we would have evolved to concentrate it in our bodies and direct it to areas suffering from inflammation. But we didn't.

[seesomesense]

Eat a kilogram of potassium iodide and see what happens.

SPOILER: . . . . . You will die of hyperkalaemia