Water Quality Criteria - Does It Guarantee Safety?

Here is something that may surprise you

Here is something that may surprise you. The water quality criteria that the EPA and municipal water authorities use to make your tap water safe doesn't guarantee 100% contaminant-free water.

It would probably be economically unfeasible to remove every contaminants in your tap water.

When you also consider that there are thousand upon thousands of chemicals in existence - it would also be impossible to reduce or eliminate all of them even if the authorities wanted to.

What water quality criteria try to do is essentially to minimize the risks of the contaminants that remain in our water supply. One major water quality criterion that demonstrates this objective is the maximum contaminants level - mcl.

The mcl is the highest amount of a particular contaminant that is legally allowed in the water supply. If a particular contaminant exist in the water supply above at a level above the mcl, water authorities are legally bound to take steps to reduce that contaminant to a sub-mcl level.

Water authorities must also alert customers of the contamination within 30 days of discovering the problem.

The EPA believes that at levels below the mcl, that particular contaminant does not pose a health risk. If the contaminant exists above the mcl, the EPA believes that contaminant poses a health risk.

However, some scientists contend that even if a contaminant exist in the water supply at levels below the mcl (which is totally legal), that contaminant could still adversely affect the human body.

These scientists believe that the cumulative effect of ingesting small amounts of contaminants in the drinking water over years and years could in the long run negatively impact your health.

Some of these contaminants, such as volatile organic chemicals, are linked to cancer, liver and kidney problems.

You could draw an analogy with smoking. Smoking cigarettes for a few months will not likely give you lung cancer. But smoking for years and years - the risk of lung cancer increases.

Therefore, as you can see, the existence of water quality criteria does not mean your tap water may not pose a danger to your health.

What you need to do is to make your tap water as safe as possible. The best way to do that is to install a quality household water filter that can further reduce the contaminants that remain in your tap water.

When you are ready to get a home filtration system, make sure you know how to choose one of high quality.

There are many filtration units on the market and you'll need to do your research to make sure you are getting one that is effective

by:David Cassell

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