How Safe is Your Tap Water?

Water is essential for life to exist. You can survive on little or no food for up to 30-40 days. It may not be a pleasant time and you're sure to have some health consequences, but you'll more than likely survive. However, you cannot survive for more than 3-5 days without water, sometimes less. We truly take our water supply for granted considering how essential it is for our existence.

According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), nearly one MILLION people become ill due to contaminated water in the United States every year. Out of those, 900 die. I suppose that seems like a small percentage of a million (0.09% to be exact), but put 900 people in a room and tell me they aren't important. The fact that so many survive has everything to do with our ability to treat the illness and nothing to do with the pureness of our water supplies.

Worldwide, nearly 6000 people die every day from lack of clean drinking water. Now that's certainly a large amount of people. Most of these cases are from water-borne bacterial infections such as cryptosporidium. Moreover, most of these deaths are in underdeveloped countries with inadequate sewage systems. However, in 1993, Milwaukee, WI had a crypto outbreak that affected 370,000 people and was directly attributed to at least 100 deaths.

So, we're not pardoned somehow from bacteria in our water supplies simply because we live in the wealthiest nation.

As a matter of fact, a large part of what is toxic about our water supplies has everything to do with what we PURPOSELY put in our water supplies to "purify" it AND what ends up in our water supply BECAUSE we live in a wealthy nation.

We use chlorine to kill the disease-causing bacteria; however, the amount of chlorine present in today's water supplies has increased greatly. The EPA (environmental protection agency) is considering leveling these amounts because some of the by-products of chlorine are carcinogenic (cancer-causing).

Treating our water is an expensive process and improving the treatment methods is considered too costly. Especially in our current economic crisis, there seems to be little hope for improvement.

In "The Blue Death" by Dr. Robert Morris, the common causes of water contamination and what needs to be done is discussed in great detail. In an op-ed to the New York Times, Dr. Morris points out that our methodology for treating water wastes money and more effective methods could be used if we redirected our funding. For instance, we use the same expensive methods to treat water that is flushed down the toilet or used to water our lawn as we do for the water we drink.

Other than the chemicals that we purposely put in our water supply, we also end up with plenty of chemicals from pesticides, herbicides and fuel additives. Parasites from manure are present in our water supplies some of which are resistant to chlorine. Giardia, for instance, is resistant to chlorine treatment. Immune compromised patients are advised by the EPA to boil tap water for one minute prior to use because of the infection risk.

So, what do we do? Drink bottled water? Unfortunately, bottled water is problematic for three reasons. Bottled water is often no better quality than tap water because it comes from the same upstream source. The plastic used to store the water may seep toxic chemicals such as phthalates and bisphenol A into the water. These chemicals may cause health problems such as endocrine system complications and ultimately, hormonal imbalance that can lead to weight gain, fatigue and irritability. And last but not least, the discarding of plastic bottles has a HUGELY negative impact on our environment.

Until we can convince our government to fund programs that will clean up our water supplies, the best thing to do is install a good reverse osmosis system (either at your kitchen sink or a whole house reverse osmosis system) to filter your water used for drinking and preparing food. At the very least, you can purchase an inexpensive carbon filtration system that uses a charcoal filter to reduce the levels of contaminants in your water. There are pitchers available that can accomplish this as well as faucet or under-sink devices that are fairly affordable.

This article was penned by Mary Franz of www.HealthyNewAge.com, the natural health blog and web site.

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