On the water front

The thirst for these huge bottles of water is getting increasingly hard to quench and, knowing this, unscrupulous vendors are palming of so-called ‘pure water’ to unsuspecting customers. Besides bringing a bad name to those firms genuinely involved in selling pure, tested bottled water, it also poses a serious health hazard to thousands of consumers.

Have you noticed the bottles? Some of them have no information about the product and sometimes what’s given is often deficient in details. Customers have a right to know what they are drinking but they forego that right when they buy blindly. Besides, how many times are these bottles of water tested? Unlike processed food, they are not required to publicise their shelf life. Many of them, as many of us would have noticed, are kept in the sun for days before being bought and it’s very likely that the water quality has diminished over time. Questions have also been raised about the packaging itself and the unscrupulous ones do not even bother to identify the source and treatment of the water they sell.

Even if the store-bought water measures up to standards, what about the bottle that’s been sitting out on the store front for days, becoming a breeding ground for bacteria, the smallest organisms on earth that can cause some of the greatest problems.

What’s needed for this industry are stricter laws and an association that will oversee the quality, specifications and safety of drinking water bottled in the five-litre gallons.