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On the water front

HOW many of us drink the water that flows out of our taps? Few, if any. But why? Is it because it’s hard water and is tasteless? But if it’s good for cooking then why not for drinking? Tap water is tried, tested and meets strict standards and, honestly, death by tap water is about as likely as death by lightning. Yet most of us prefer to go for the bottled variety, especially the huge five-gallon ones.

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.