Water purification in India is a serious issue. Contaminated water there can kill.

We never drink unpurified, or unfiltered water. After all as we have said over and over there is nasty contaminants in our water, and wo don’t want to be drinking them.

However in India those contaminants can kill. Bacteria and cysts can be found in the ground water, paricularly when there are events that stress the water supply like monsoons. You don’t want to be drinking water contaminated with bacteria or cysts, they could make you sick. Really sick.

But for the people, and particularly the poor people, of India this is a real issue. They normally don’t have access to modern water filtration technology that filters out these contaminants, and the results can be deadly.

No more though for the people of Punjab. A new water filter has been launched there that is affordable for the locals to buy. It filters out nasties like bacteria and cysts, and so is a huge improvement for the local people and their health.

We bet they sell like hot cakes, after all, who wants to drink bacteria or cysts? Read the rest of this entry

Rather than calling for a reduction in flouridation, today there are calls for more!

You may have heard of the chaos in the UK government, resignations galore and so on. Well they have a new Health Secretary there called Andy Burnham, appointed by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

And Andy Burnham, as the new Health Secretary, is calling for more flouridation of the UKs drinking water.

Now we have recently featured some of the studies and the calls for LESS flouridation in our water,  so what gives in the UK so that in June of 09 they want MORE flouride in the water.

Well it just happens that Mr Burnham is a recent Vice President of the British Flouridation Society.

You’d think that someone with his power and influence would do what is best for the public health, however despite evidence to the contrary he’s trying to add more contaminants to the drinking water rather than remove them.

What do you think will happen to sales of water filters in the UK? I suspect they’ll go up.

After all, apart from  filtering out the flouride, have you ever tasted London water? Yuk. Read the rest of this entry

Did you realize how many eminent scientists oppose flouridation of water?

Everyone assumes that because we have flouride in our water it must be good. After all don’t all those dentists keep telling us that if there’s flouride in our water our teeth are protected from cavities?

Not everyone, though, agrees that flouride in water is a good idea, or safe.

In 2006 there was a report issued by a panel appointed by the National Research Council of the National Academies. That report found that around 1 in 3 children are negatively affected by excess flouride, and that this negative affect is found in both the health of their teeth, and also more general health complaints.

The report also suggested that the EPAs drinking water standard for flouride (4 ppm) should be lowered.

The panel included some very eminent scientists, including a nobel prize laureate in medicine and a previous EPA scientist, and a total of around 2000 scientists.

Here’s a short video about it.

However despite that report we still have flouride in our water.

Further Health Canada has also suggested lowering the incidence of flouride in the water. Other recommendations include that infant formula should not be mixed with flouridated water to protect the health of babies.

I wrote about chlorine in drinking water yesterday. Here’s some more about chorinated water

Yesterday we had a reader contact us asking about our article about chlorinated drinking water, and the risks of drinking water contaminated with chlorine.

He asked a question about a point that we hadn’t covered. If we don’t like chlorine in the water we drink, what would happen if we didn’t have the chlorine?

Good point well made. We didn’t actually advocate the discontinuation of chlorine purification from municipal water supplies. Chlorine fulfills a very important function.

There is absolutely no doubt that our water supplies, including our drinking water, can be contaminated with various bugs and living organisms that would seek to do us harm. If we were to drink water that had not been treated for contamination by organisms like bacteria we would all run a very high risk of getting seriously ill.

We advocate the use of water filtration to remove water contaminants of any kind, and advocate the importance of drinking clean water. Chlorine free drinking water.

Chlorine works well to kill nasties that may be in our water, and this is good. If the chlorine wasn’t there our water would be just about undrinkable from a health point of view, just look at what is happening in Zimbabwe right now with people contracting cholera, sometimes from contaminated water.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, chlorine is necessary in municipal water to combat living contaminants.

For some people it isn’t necessary to have chlorine in our water. The authors have chosen to install rainwater tanks (and we use the best water filter to filter that water) so that they are drinking the cleanest water possible, and it isn’t necessary to chlorinate rainwater. Well so far it isn’t necessary. But municipal water supplies are different.

So don’t get us wrong, chlorine currently performs an essential task, and will probably be in our water for a long time. Just remember, you don’t need to drink chlorine. The best water filters will remove it, so your water is uncontaminated by chlorine.

Modern carbon filtering successfully removes chlorine. Read the rest of this entry