What "Stuff" is causing your Drinking Water Quality to be Poor?
Water quality is a term used to describe the chemical, physical, and biological characteristics of water, usually in respect to how suitable it is for a particular purpose. It's not a simple thing to say that "this water is good," or "it's bad." Water that is perfectly good to wash cars with is not be good enough to use by a doctor who is doing surgery! When you ask about quality of your water, you probably want to know if the water is good enough to use for your family, to play in, to serve in a restaurant. Or if the quality of our natural waters are suitable for aquatic plants and animals. What do we mean by "water quality"?Water quality can be looked at as just how suitable water is for a particular use based on selected physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. To determine water quality, scientists first measure and analyze characteristics of the water such as temperature, dissolved mineral content, and number of bacteria. Selected characteristics are then compared to numeric standards and guidelines to decide if the water is suitable for a particular use. Who
sets the standards and guidelines? Standards for drinking water quality ensure that public drinking water supplies are as safe as possible. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the States are responsible for establishing the standards for constituents in water that have been shown to pose a risk to human health. Other standards protect aquatic life, including fish, and fish-eating wildlife such as birds. How does human activities affect water quality?Urban and industrial development, farming, mining, combustion of fossil fuels, animal feeding operations, and other human activities can change the quality of natural waters. As an example of the effects of human activities on water quality, fertilizers that are applied to crops and lawns. These plant nutrients are dissolved easily in rainwater or snow melt runoff. Excess nutrients carried to streams and lakes encourage abundant growth of algae leading to low oxygen in the water and the possibility of fish kills. Chemicals such as pharmaceutical drugs, dry-cleaning solvents, and gasoline that are used in urban and industrial activities have been found in streams and ground water. After decades of over use, pesticides are now widespread in streams and ground water. Some pesticides have not been used for 20 to 30 years, and are still detected in fish and stream sediment at levels that pose a potential risk to human health, aquatic life, and fish-eating wildlife. Consuming water that contains traces of some of the over 80,000 synthetic chemicals what we use forces the liver and kidneys to filter out those harmful contaminates, ultimately damaging or even destroying two of our most vital organs. There are so many chemicals in use today that determining the risk to human health and aquatic life is a complex task. In addition, mixtures of chemicals typically are found in water, but health-based standards and guidelines have not been established for chemical mixtures.  The water that comes out of your tap or the bottled water you drink is critical to your family. There are serious health risks of drinking contaminated water. If the water we consume already contains chlorine or other chemicals‚ it can not carry toxins out of our body as well. Today more than ever you are hearing about places where the quality of our water is not good enough for normal uses. Bacteria, protozoa like crypto, and heavy metals like lead or arsenic have gotten into our drinking water supplies, sometimes causing severe illness. Sewage spills have occurred, causing people to boil their drinking water; pesticides and other chemicals have seeped into the ground and have harmed the water in aquifers; and, runoff containing pollutants from roads and parking lots have affected the water quality of urban streams. With an abundant intake of good, clean‚ healthy water we allow our body to perform all the healing processes that it is naturally capable of. The best way to ensure the removal of the chemicals and toxins present in our water is by a high quality point-of-use water filtration system that will improve your quality of your water and eliminate nearly all the potential dangers in your water. And remember that there are health benefits to drinking clean and healthy water.
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