The Water You Drink: how safe is it?
By John Archer
Pure Water Press
41 Cornelian Road, Pearl Beach NSW 2256
120 pp., $13.50
Reviewed by Dot Tumney
No, don't cringe; just trade in your coffee machine for a water filter. Archer provides a useful information summary and practical guide on why and how to improve your water consumption.
Two litres a day is a lot when it tastes like tap water. I always make tea with mine, so my hydration level is fine, but the caffeine and tannin would be a bit excessive. Archer takes mild offence at the fact that the most basic thing in life is not a pleasure.
Because water is a solvent, delivery of large amounts over long distances means it picks up all sorts of things on the way. Chlorination and filtering keep it free of cholera and dead rats, but it reacts with pipes, hangs on to lots of stuff it picked up earlier. It requires other management to deal with chlorine-resistant organisms and careful checking that dissolved materials — both deliberate and accidental — don't intensify each other's effects.
Having detailed these items, Archer provides some information on the failings of the distribution and quality control systems in our water supply. The Choice survey on water quality gets a serve for relying on information supplied by water authorities rather than doing its own testing.
Water suppliers are not big on freedom of information. (Sydney Water is threatening to sue Archer over this book.) Anti-fluoride campaigners are still viewed as totally off the wall. The Water Board issues leaflets on not keeping fish in tap water without letting the additives leach out first.
The problems likely to arise from city water supplies are hard to assess because, like so many other things in high tech societies, the effects of low doses, continual exposure and localised interactions are hard to keep track of — especially when measurements aren't done on lots of things.
Just in case you are wondering why big buildings supply separate drinking water so often, it's because the flow through the pipes is insufficient to change the water completely, and the concentration of dissolved metals remains high.
Having whetted your appetite for H2Only in your drinking water, Archer then goes on to discuss the qualities of filtration systems and the properties of tanks. He also lists his sources and references at the end of each section, so follow-up research is easy. Good value.