Not in America! You mean the water is not safe to drink?
By sharone74
@sharone74 (4837)
United States
February 12, 2011 6:39pm CST
If you were asked to name countries where people don't have access to clean drinking water the last place that you would think of would be America right? But according to news reports, scientific reports, etc. The water that comes out of our taps into our homes is not safe. Now you can buy bottled water (some is no better than the tap water), you can filter, you can even use shower head filters to clean the water before you use it. Doesn't that seem like we're having to go to extreme measures though when we have to filter every drop of water that we drink and we bathe in? Studies show that you can take in just as many nasty contaminants in the shower as you can from drinking it. So we need to filter the water that comes into our homes in order to be safe. Check out the reports from the EWG about water safety in America if you don't believe me. There is some scary stuff going on with our water.
http://www.ewg.org/tap-water/sourcesofwaterpollution
http://www.ewg.org/node/26128
1 person likes this
8 responses
@laglen (19759)
• United States
13 Feb 11
There is also reports of digested medicine being tracked through drinking water. There are just too many people. The safest way is to boil your water. I just use a filter pitcher. There is no way that going through life, you wont pick up some contaminates.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
Regular contaminants are one thing, things like dirt, rust etcetera. They have found the ingredients from rocket fuel in over 50% of the water supply. There is asbestos, chemical run off from farms and animal husbandry pesticides and chemicals, poisons and toxins. It is all in there. Most water pitchers filter 3 contaminants lead, mercury, and I believe either rust or salt. There is one type of water pitcher that filters out 14 chemical contaminants but a faucet mounted filter is not much more expensive than the cost of a pitcher and they clean between 33 and 48 different contaminants out of your water. A whole home water filter (impractical for most) is the only type of filter to remove over 200 of the 315 and of those I believe only two remove all 315 contaminants from tap water. I recently wrote an article about the topic for Associated Content.
1 person likes this
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
4 Mar 11
The only thing laglen that seems affordab le and doable is to filter the water that comes into your home or apartment. Try to eliminate as many chemicals and pollutants as possible from your water supply. There are filters that you can put directly on your kitchen tap that cost no more than 20-30 dollars on ebay. There are also shower water filters (2 stage) that you can buy for less thatn 20.00. Yes there are filtration products that cost more, do your research on the popular products that are available and you wil find that it is not all that expensive to have filtered clean water for your home.
1 person likes this
@rosegardens (3032)
• United States
13 Feb 11
It may depend on the region one lives in. I have heard for years California water is not safe, and they began drinking bottled water many years before I ever laid eyes on water in a bottle for sale.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
Some bottled water is not safe either. Some of it is just tap water from another district bottled for convenience. You need filtered or purified. Spring water is also subject to pollution and contaminants. It is almost to the point that I feel much better filtering it myself rather than taking the word of some company I know nothing about simply for convenience sake.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
4 Mar 11
They have fitlers on QVC and Calibex that will filter up to 15000 gallons of water which cost only 40.00. They also have home filters that filter all of the water that comes into your home. These are the best and they filter out the most toxins and pollutants from your water. These are extremely cheap. But doesn't the government have a responsibility to provide us all with clean drinking water?
@rosegardens (3032)
• United States
3 Mar 11
True, some is bottled from tap. A rip off for sure! I have a filter on my refrigerator now. All I need is to get it hooked up and voila, good water. I have noticed since I have been drinking bottled water, the water from the tap is nasty. Can hardly wait to get the filtered water off the refrigerator. Will feel much better about giving that to my cats as well.
@Monkeyrose (2840)
• Canada
13 Feb 11
I'm not from the states so I don't know how safe the water is there. I do know that when I travel there I drink the water. All travel guides say its safe to do so. I'm from Canada and we have very clean water here. In Vancouver, where I'm from originally, we have some of the cleanest and tasty water around. Right now I'm way up north in the Yukon and we drink well water here. The well water has a nasty sulfer taste but is still safe to drink.
Be careful of drinking bottled water. Most bottled water isn't even filtered. There are some studies that even show that it can be bad for you.
Also remember, just because water tastes bad or funny doesn't necessarily mean that it is unsafe.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
Where I live most of our water is ground water from an underground aquifer so it is naturally mineralized. Hence the fizzing when it first comes out of the tap and is oxygenated. Where I live they have maintained for years that we have some of the best water in the world, partly because it is sealed in down there under us. We are still among the top one hundred best tap water qualities in the nation. We are at the bottom of the top 100 (97th) but they tested 250 million water samples so to be in the top 100 around the nation is really saying something I guess.
@bird123 (10658)
• United States
13 Feb 11
The government has been making water companies test their water. You should be getting a report once a year telling you what is in your water. Some parts of the USA have really good, clean water where other places have water not fit to drink. This report will give you an idea how your water is if you don't already know. If you buy bottled water, make sure it is distilled water. That will be lots cleaner than the mere filtered water some companies sell.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
water authorities are government agencies so yes the government makes them test their water. Meer testing is not enough, they have to filter it, clean it, do something to ensure that the product is safe. What is being piped into our homes and down our throats is not safe, it is not clean, in fact where I live it is not even clear when it first comes out of the taps it is a light delicate grey, and it fizzes. Say what you want about water but it is not supposed to fizz, minerals or not.
lakshmi- I had heard about Dr. Emotos experiments and his results. The chi around you though is not just affected by your own thoughts and feelings but the thoughts and the feelings of those around you and you can''t make everyone think positive thoughts all the time.
@lakshmi11 (278)
• United States
13 Feb 11
Dr. Emoto found that crystals formed in frozen water changed when they were subjected to certain thoughts send to them. Good thoughts formed beautiful crystals and bad thoughts formed deformed christals. He then rounded up a group of monks to pray for a very polluted lake. He photographed the crystals before they prayed and after they prayed at the lake. The prayers changed the water.
If you put words like gratefulness and love on the bottle of water you keep for drinking you can have the same results.-- I think we all need to change our thoughts.- Just think that we all consist mostly of water.---
@Marmot (590)
• United States
13 Feb 11
I don't drink water directly because I don't trust the water is clean enough. Both for my own country and US. And I have asked some of my friends in US that whether they drink the water from tap, they all said no because they don't think the water is clean also.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
19 Feb 11
When you add the fact that just about every body of groundwater on the planet is polluted daily with petrochemicals and the byproducts therein. Smog, acid rain, all of it adds up to there really being no fresh clean untainted water to be had anywhere at any price.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
Doesn't anyone feel that it is a problem for the supposedly greatest industrialized nation in the world to not be capable of providing clean drinking water to the people that pay taxes and water bills for just such a service?
@Marmot (590)
• United States
16 Feb 11
It is true that we all want to have a clean water from the tap. But, think about it. The tap is connected with pipelines right? Even if the water is clean, but the pipeline can not be clean very often. So, if there are something in the pipeline, it will comes out with the water. So, I never think there will be clean water at all.
@stk40m (1118)
• Koeln, Germany
13 Feb 11
in Germany the drinking water is said to be more clean than mineral water from bottles as the drinking water is strictly controled. However that doesn't say anything about the water pipes that lead into our homes. Sometimes I have the impression that the water tastes very much like iron, sometimes it tastes as if there's stuff in it that doesn't belong there.
As for America I've read some articles about hydraulic fracturing. They said that this industrial method to exploit oil and natural gas contaminated the groundwater with chemicals which is partly used as drinking water. You can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
scroll down to paragraph 'Environmental and health effects'
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
4 Mar 11
I've heard about that. Where I live we are living the nightmare rather than the dream in some areas. There are several settlements on the east end of the v alley that have had their water tested and they have discovered the components of rocket fuel in their tap water. They have even gone so far as to tell residents of that area that the water is not safe to even shower in. So they are all buying bottled water and are trying to get the area water hooked up to the municipal water of a neighboring city rather than draw water off of the wells that they have been pumping water from for years. I live in a desert so all of our water is underground. That means that it can be contaminated by anything that leaches through the dirt.
@ganeshprabhuk (1722)
• India
13 Feb 11
I feel due to pollution most of the countries do not get clean water to drink. Drinking clean water is becoming a night mare now a days. Drinking water getting is a rare thing. We used bottled water but still we do not know how safe it is.
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
You can check it to find out how safe it is. Surely you know someone who goes to university. Have thenm get one of their friends in the biology or chemistry lab to take a look at samples of the water that you drink. Like I said before, it is getting to the point even with bottled water that you want to put it through your own reverse osmosis or activated charcoal filter to make sure that someone filters it at least. Especially in countries where the general water supply is tainted or where the piping is old.
@macdingolinger (10385)
• United States
13 Feb 11
I have heard about this for years. I buy bottled water and always check to make sure it isn't simply from another public water system! Here where I live there are cancer causing elements. Their only response was to cite some city in a state not even close to here that has the same amount or more.. I was like - oh yea, that makes it safer to consume! idiots. They keep trying to tell us that tap water is safe but it certainly is not!
@sharone74 (4837)
• United States
16 Feb 11
You're right it's not, but according to Rutgers University we take in almost as many contaminants from our tap water in the shower as we would from drinking it. A faucet or counter mounted filtration system would be a great alternative to all those non green friendly plastic water bottles too. The filtratioon pitchers don't filter nearly as many contaminants as a tap mounted or counter top filtration unit and a whole house filter is better still. If we can filter it though why don't they, since it is a government agency who sells it to us they should regulate a minimum standard of safe drinking water.
