Pick Your Poison: The American Drinking Water Quality Crisis

The United States of America is perceived by many of its resident citizens to be a developed and highly advanced nation, and as such, these same citizens often make the mistake of assuming that their homeland is not susceptible to foundational, or “basic” infrastructural flaws such as those related to drinking water quality issues that might be more often associated with still-developing or otherwise less-developed nations. However, our country is one that is in fact plagued by this very scourge, and it is a formidable problem with massive health and environmental implications. Unfortunately, our government’s failures to address the array of drinking water quality concerns are largely indiscriminate; for we have not been sufficiently protected from possible contamination by either the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates tap sources, or the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees bottled ones.

Introduction

There have been, over the years, some significant strides taken towards cleaner and more pure drinking water both nationwide and on the state and local levels, but these amount to a drop in the bucket when contrasted with the abhorrent negligence and inaction with which this troublesome matter has been treated by not only the government and its agencies, but by the public as well. Finding and implementing sound solutions to this subject of interest has been further complicated and obstructed by the extensive power and reach of the (quite literally) venomous tentacles of chemical-industrial and oil and natural gas lobbies along with other point-source polluters, non-point source (runoff) polluter lobbies, and the far-from-benign corporate clutches into which more and more water sources are being privatized at the expense of the common man. For the purposes of this article, we will highlight the hazards currently posed by microbiological, physical, chemical, and radiological toxins in tap water and put these under This Week In Truth’s microscope so that the reader may be brought up to date on America’s drinking water quality crisis. Additionally, we will delve into not only what little, yet positively consequential, good has been done in the name of improving drinking water quality in the United States in recent decades, but we will also investigate the barriers to further progress on this topic, which include but are not limited to those hindrances mentioned briefly above.

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