 Iodine is good because you can carry it in your first aid kit since it's a great antiseptic for wounds and you can use it for water if you need to (used it more for the former than the latter it has to be said - it's used to swab down before surgery in theatre). No extra weight/stuff! 
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Iodine is not particulary healthy in your system.... It's even advised not too use it too long. For some comprehensive reading on water treatment. http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/yellowBookCh2-FoodWaterRisks.aspx It's a bit outdated since the introduction of steripen en Miox but it still holds the truth. And even Miox and Steripen have their flaws. I personally skip iodine. I just carry a filter which weighs as much as a quart of a liter of extra water while in fact I'm carrying with it an almost unlimited amount for the duration of my hike of virtually clean water without chemical health risks from Iodine or bad taste of chlorine. Even unclear water with loads of floating parts can be treated when filtering. It's just a choice. Do I carry that 700 gramms extra instead of a bad taste from chlorine, extra fuel or iodine intake?
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Like I said - I also virtually always skip iodine because I don't use it BUT - NOT HEALTHY?!! Without iodine your entire metabolism breaks down and you become hyperthyroid and develop a goitre... actually I won't bother - follow the link called "iodine the missing ingredient" - it has to be added to salt in mant developing countires and is curatively in this one for various purposes! http://www.coconutstudio.com/Iodine.htm People really need iodine! 
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 Sure you need iodine... like you need a whole lot of things to stay alive... but in moderation. Iodine is poisonous if you take too much of it. So, for that matter, are some vitamins. Even oxygen is poisonous if you breathe a high concentration of it. Naturally occurring oxygen in the air, while essential to life, is only a junior partner in the atmosphere, being well diluted by nitrogen, which forms the vast bulk of the atmosphere. Iron is essential to life. Too much iron is poisonous. Ditto calcium... and almost everything else you can think of.
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O,o, o I meant iodine for watertreatment longer than a few weeks is not that healthy. You then use large quantities of that stuff. Some iodine in salt is not needed in our western regions and it is in fact not reallly harmfull in such small quantities it's added to salt. Unless your are an iodined salt addict than you might run eventually in health problems from that stuff. There is a saying about to much of anything... For desinfecting wounds and such iodine is great, however I prefer alcohol for the obvious reason . I also carry it with me, drinkable grade that is ...
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Precisely, Iodine poisoning is extremely rare and takes grams - roughly as much as paracetamol probably and that's a licensed over the counter medicine. Not enough in a bottle - who ever harmed themselves from purifying water!!? In the second world war seaweed was considered as a potential source for potentially low iodine levels in the country - it's lack leads to cretinism. Radioactive forms are injected into people every day in UK hospitals. OK - no need to continue - no-one be afraid of using iodine!
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Whoops - sorry - crossed there!!!! apologies!
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 Steripen means batteries and reliance on something which may break (and has been known to do so just at the wrong time...). Boiling would be a good solution where fuel was unlimited -- maybe when using a wood stove? Filtering is good, but can take quite a while (and effort with pump filtering) for non-trivial amounts of water (the Aquagear idea seems a good one for "on the move" use). Various chemical solutions are light weight and convenient. We stock Aquaventure (formerly called Aquamira) in the shop because in my own use I've found it convenient, moderate cost and with no discernable taste -- for me it's a good solution for most of my outdoors water needs. (The iodine thing is related to use over longer periods, 3 to 6 months depending on which stuff you look up, but you still need to neutralise the taste with a second treatment of neutraliser -- too much faff IMHO.)
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Miox means batteries as well... About iodine, I wonder why the CDC warns against constantly usage of iodine for watertreatment for a few weeks in a row? Sure they do it not for nothing (U S of the A; the land of lawsuits...) And using your iodine disenfectant for watertreatment, I don't know. Fluid medical iodine contains only 2% of the pure Idione element which is needed for water treatment. The other 98% is mostly alcohol. Seems to me that this percentage of Iodine is too less for proper short term watertreatment. When iodine is used in a good manner (that is using the right iodine dose for watertreatment) it seems to taste bad as well as chlorine. Pumpfiltering is only a one minute or even on a good pump half a minute pump for a liter of water and rightly drinkable. How sow trivial? When using iodine or chlorin I have to wait for a long while before it's cleaned and drinkable. Dripfilters are more lightweight but also take some time, they are a good solution as well, but I like the ease of pumping better, it's quicker. I'm very fond of the fact I can take a break, pump some water for my food and some for underway. Never carrying too much water. And what chemicals are used in Aquaventure, that's just a brandname it states nothing about the chemical elements in it. I've used Hadex, that's based on Chlorine and when I used the prescribed amount of drops for cleaning I always tasted the chlorine... if I took too less the cleaning process couldn't be trusted.
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Aquaventure/Aquamira uses chlorine dioxide (defo no chlorine taste though!). I switched from pump filtering because I got fed up of pumping away when I was tired and just wanted to eat! With Aquaventure I leave it doing its stuff while I pitch the Akto and unpack; by the time I'm ready to make dinner the water's ready.
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chlorine dioxide is the same cleaning principle as Miox. Pretty neat if it's without batteries, cause it's indeed tasteless. Doesn't kill all living things instantly though, especially cryptosporidium is a problem. Chlorine dioxide needs at least 4 hours to kill these buggers off (with filtering no problem). And also chemicals in your water stay in your water. The bugger is each method has it's drawbacks, only combinations of different methods are foolproof. Even filtering has the drawback that it doesn't stop all virueses, the very small ones (very rare) get throught a <1mu filter. So you must combine a filter with some sort of chemical treatment to kill the small stuff. Vice versa chemical treatments need to be combined with filtering to remove other parts which aren't affected by chemical treatment.
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