I'm afraid you've asked! Water contaminants, filters and more. by: John M. Taggart

In this discussion of water and it's importance in our lives, we will touch on various components, measurements, and water contaminants and their health effects.
We have come become so accustomed to turning on the tap and expecting fresh clean potable water to come out, that we have overlooked some very important hazards.

The reason for this is that historically, the primary thrust and concern of the water treatment industry has been water purification by disinfection. When talking about water purification and disinfection, we are talking about eliminating any type of pathogenic material. Pathogens include: germs, viruses, bacteria, microbes, algae, fungi, and so forth.

There are a number of different ways of disinfecting water. Primary in the 20th century have been ozone and chlorine. Chlorine came to eminence in the U.S. during the age of "Chemistry for Better Living" because it could be easily transported and was very good at preventing diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, amoebiasis, hepatitis, and Giardia.

As a result of the effectiveness of using chlorine and ozone as primary disinfectants and then some type of residual disinfectant on the way to the customers, people have been lulled into a false sense of security where water is concerned.

Consider this - worldwide, according to World Health Organization statistics, more than 1.5 billion people in developing nations are without safe drinking water.
As a result of this, more than thirty thousand people a DAY die of waterborne diseases. In the seven years from 1978 through 1984, there were just under 72 thousand cases of diseases associated with drinking water in the U.S. The majority of these cases were acute gastrointestinal illnesses.

An acute gastrointestinal illness is a tummy ache. In all of the reports at our disposal, we are unable to find evidence of a death caused by drinking water in the U.S. We can't say that there weren't any and we can't say that there were.
However, when we compare 72 thousand tummy aches in the U.S. over a seven year period to 75 million DEATHS worldwide, we can assume and rest assured that we have the disinfection problem solved.

So why then do we have all this row about water treatment, different filters and different types of disinfection?

Why is there a burgeoning in the point of use water treatment business whereby the industry went from 200 million in 1980 to nearly a 5 billion dollars a year in business by 1990? The bottled water business has seen even more dramatic growth than that.

The reason is that there are a number of different categories of water contamination. In addition to the pathogens that are targeted by the disinfectants there are toxins that, while not of as immediate a threat to us as micro-organisms, will over a period of time build up in your body and have an adverse impact on your well being.

In order to make sense out of all the claims that are made amongst the different manufacturers of various types of water treatment equipment and the cautions that we receive from health care providers regarding the multitude of water contaminants we encounter, we will first list six types of water contamination and then discuss the various water treatment technologies and expound upon their attributes.
Before we touch on the different categories, I would like to mention our water tables and how these things get into our water supply.

These contaminants come from industrial waste, agriculture, residential fertilizer and pesticide use, the dumping of solvents into the atmosphere and into our surface waters.

There are byproducts of different industrial processes and direct dumping of industrial wastes as well as toxic residues of chemicals that we use in the environment. All of these find their way into our aquifers and surface waters and eventually into your tap.

It is reasonable for us to expect our water authorities to deliver pathogen free, potable water that does not have an excessive amount of toxins in it to our homes. It is unreasonable to expect them to deliver water that the average health conscious person would consider fit for human consumption.

There are three reasons for this:

1) Cost, our water bills would be four times what they are today if our water authorities were to remove all the things that we expect wholesome water to be free of.
2) Practicality, only 2% of the water that leaves the water authority winds up being consumed by humans so the expense that would go toward making wholesome water for someone to wash their car with would have been wasted.
3) Logistics, a portion of the contaminants that are in the water that comes out of your tap come from the pipes that carry the water to you after it has been treated. All three of these factors make P.O.U. (point of use) water treatment devices the only viable means for us to get the quality of water we desire.

In my opinion there are six categories of water contaminant.
We are going to name each one at this point and give you examples of each one and tell you about there basic hazards.

Inorganic Materials: These include sand, metal flakes, flocculant, rust and dirt. Inorganic Materials are things that are visible in the water and floating around. The potential hazard these pose is that they can give your water foul taste, poor color, a bad odor, and you could conceivably get nausea from drinking water with excessive amounts of inorganic materials.

Ionic Material: These are minerals. There is calcium, magnesium, silicone, sodium, iron, zinc and so forth. Minerals are measured as TDS in PPM.

TDS is totally dissolved solids and PPM is parts per million. There is a discussion as to whether minerals are a boon or bane to your health later on in this article. Let it suffice for the time being to say that since minerals are something other than H20 they are a contaminant, however they pose no immediate threat to your health.
Heavy Metals: Among these are fluoride, lead, silver, copper, arsenic, and aluminum.

e could go into the poisonous effects of heavy metals and talk about them at length but we don't have the room to enumerate all of their deleterious effects.
Just looking at their names should give any reader a good inclination as to the toxicity of heavy metals. Let is suffice for us to say that the MCL (maximum contamination level) set by the EPA (environmental protection agency) is for all of these one part per million or lower.

Water that is coming through your pipes can have amounts that approach or exceed those levels frequently. Older pipes in particular can have excessive amounts of lead, copper and silver. These metals are very poisonous and that’s why the MCL's are set so low.

One of those heavy metals, flouride or more technically sodium flouride is placed into the water in about 50% of the municipalities in the U.S. Flouride is a prevelant element in the environment.

It is so widespread throughout nature, that a small intake of it is almost unavoidable. In areas with high levels of naturally occurring fluoride, 30 year old men are bent over and hobble like seventy year olds.

However, because of its toxic properties, fluoride is used in the manufacture of insecticides and rat poison. It is principally a byproduct of the aluminum manufacture industry in addition to a few other tangental industries.

From the beginning of the century there had been so many liability cases for aluminum manufacturers from farmers on nearby tracts of land, that they were looking for a way to eliminate their disposal problem and found a way to rid themselves of this liability while turning a profit by foisting it upon the American public.

By perpetuating the myth that this well known rat poison was good for ones teeth and through some influence peddling we wound up with sodium fluoride in our drinking water.

Flouride is more toxic than lead and just slightly less toxic than arsenic. Flouride primarily has an affinity for the calcium in our bones and secondarily for the soft tissue of our organs and fat. We have the ability to eliminate 50% of the flouride that is introduced into our bodies daily. Flouride is not a nutrient. It is a toxin.

In recent years the EPA raised the maxium contamination level from 2 parts per million to 4 parts per million. At the same time the maximum contamination level for lead, a substance slightly less toxic than flouride, is .05 parts per million. That is a level that is 80 times higher for something that is more poisonous, flouride.
It seems odd that the EPA would allow a substance more toxic than lead to have an MCL eighty times greater than that of lead.

It must have been that same hand at work when they recommended a .7 part per million be added to municipal water systems. So we have the government recommending a level of .7 parts per million be added to municipal water systems on the one hand and on the other hand warning in the Federal Register that chronic exposure to .7 parts per million can cause severe dental mottling and skeletal fluorosis.

Yet the MCL is 4 PPM.

The way this entire calamity got started was during the early 50's. A man by the name of Oscar Ewing was head of the FSA which is the precursor to the EPA.
He was also a partner in the law firm that represented ALCOA The Aluminum Company of America. It was during this period that epedemiological (population) data was shamelessly manipulated to falsely demonstrate an association between water flouridation and a reduction in tooth decay.

This led to the approval of water fluoridation of municipal water supplies. At about that same time began of a long legacy against water fluoridation by the likes of Dr. Taylor and Dr. Dean Burke, and John Yomouyiannis these battles have covered over thirty years to a point where today there is a pending strike by the NFFE, the EPA's Professional Union.

This crisis emanates from the the dubious way in which the EPA responded on a twelve year NTP study and recommended to Congress favorably on the safety of fluoride.

They were given all of 36 hours to review 12 years of data. Data that was seriously flawed, and when viewed in the appropriate light would have led any reasonable person to conclude that the immediate cessation of water fluoridation nationwide was essential and long overdue, because of its toxicity.

We don't add vitamin B to our water, why should we add rat poison. Since only 2% of treated water is consumed, water fluoridation at best is an innefficient way to medicate a population - at worst it is a cruel and malicious fraud being perpetrated against a disinformed population. Let the aluminum industry dispose of its waste in a responsible fashion. In short heavy metals are extremely toxic and need to be removed from the water.

Micro-Organisms: This fourth category includes any type of bacteria, fungi, mold, spores, yeast, algae, fecal viruses, Giardia, legionella, coliforms, and streptoccal.
These are your pathogens, germs, bacteria and disease causing organisms. Their removal is always done through some type of process of oxidation known as disinfection. One important aspect of the water treatment process is that when water gets treated there is a primary and a residual disinfectant.

By primary disinfectant, we mean the initial treatment the water recieves as it comes into the plant; that is where it gets all the treatment necessary to become potable.
From there, that water is sent out to the various customers and it is necessary to put a residual disinfectant into the water on its way from the plant to insure that it has no bacteria when it arrives at the customer. The further the water is being sent, the more residual disinfectant it requires.

Different disinfectants such as hydrogen peroxide, ozone, chlorine and chloramine have different efficacies as primary and secondary disinfectants.

Micro-organisms are responsible for gastrointestinal disorders, diarrhea, cholera, salmonella, Giardiasis, hepatitis, shigellosis, and dysentary. If you came into contact with any of these things, you would know immediately.

In the wetern world the disinfection problem has largely been overcome and we are more concerned with eliminating the other types of contaminants that are toxic in nature. Most care should be taken however, when camping or using water that has not been treated by a municipality.

Organic Compounds: or organic chemicals. Contrary to their name, organic chemicals are manmade.

There are tens of thousands of them. They are extremely pervasive in every aspect of daily American living. They are the solvents in the inks in printing, the solvents in our paints and dyes. They are used in aerosols, dry cleaning, pesticides, herbicides, they are in fertilizers....

Organic chemicals are essentially pertroleum byproducts, therefore, hydrocarbon chains. Because of the presence of the carbon atoms they are called organic, organic compounds.

The more familiar names are chloroform, benzene, vinyl chloride, DDT, Lindane, EDB, carbontetrachloride, polylethylenes, and styrene. An important thing to keep in mind where organic chemicals are concerned is that they are not water soluble. They do not dissolve in water.

Once they find their way into the environment, they circulate until the find a medium into which they are soluble.

Organic chemicals are fat soluble. Fat is found in the tissues of plants and animals. Animals that eat plants have higher concentrations of organic chemicals in their adipose tissues than the plants that they have consumed. Then carnivores eat these herbivores and have higher concentrations of organic chemicals than their prey.
Organic chemicals have the insidious property of working their way up the food chain in increasing concentrations. This process is known as bioaccumulation.

The concentrations of organic chemicals that we find in our shower and tap water are lower than in things like vegetables, fish, meat and dairy (in that order). However the sheer volume and chronic nature of our water use habits creates a situation where our water use vies with our diets to be the number one contributor to the accumulation of organic chemicals in the adipose tissues of our bodies.
This situation makes the pursuit of properly filtered water, range fed critters and organically grown produce one that is anything but trivial.

Organic chemicals are known to be immunosupressive. They bioaccumulate in our bodies until their cumulative and synergistic effects manifest themselves in ways that we are just beginning to understand. There are a host of new diseases afflicting the American public that did not exist 15 years ago.

Among them are Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Epstein Barr, Hypersensitivity, AIDS, MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity), Total Allergy Syndrome and runaway mental illness rates. Could it be that these perky little compounds from the "Chemistry for Better Living" era are contributing factors to these immuno impairment maladies?
Because they are foreign to the body, organic chemicals cannot be oxidized.
The body can only eliminate things that it can oxidize. So they bioaccumluate in the adipose tissue until they cause problems. According to the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) scientists have identified more than 4 million chemical compounds since 1965.

Of these, sixty thousand are in wide use in the U.S. today. Many of these are organic chemicals. During this same thirty year period, scientific proof of the mutogenic, teritagenic, allergenic, carcinogenic and neurotoxic properties of organic chemicals in general and pesticides and fertilizers in particular has burgeoned.

The use of these miracles of modern science has quadrupled and the mineral nutrients in our grains and vegetables has plummeted by 80%. All this as crop loss due to pests has nearly doubled. Apparently organic chemicals are about as good for plants and soil as they are for us.

One way to illustrate the fat solubility of organic chemicals is to sight the National Human Adipose Tissue Survey (NHATS). It was conducted by the Public Health Service a few years ago.

They tested the fat of thousands of people for the presence of 100 toxic chemicals. The top thirty five of these were present in at least 50% of the subjects tested and at least five were observed in everyone. Among those top five were DDT and a number of other pesticides.

We know that there are 60 thousand widely used chemicals in the U.S. finding their way into our water table. Many of them proven to pose no health hazard at the levels to which we are exposed.

With the results of the NHATS test however, by virture of the fact that they did conduct a test, they were looking for the ones that are the most toxic. These are the ones that we need to be protected from, and they were detected in such a tremendous majority of people.

So it's important to remove these chemicals from the water because they are immunosuppressive, mutagenic, teritagenic, allergenic, carcinogenic, and neurotoxic. Oh, and I forgot to mention just plain old toxic.

THM's (trihalomethanes): The sixth category of water contaminant really belongs in the fifth category because they are organic chemicals. Because of the nature of these monsters, we are putting them in a category all their own. That category is trihalomethanes (THM's). THM's are formed when chlorine is added to water.
We add chlorine to water in order to disinfect it. What you are looking to disinfect or oxidize with chlorine is organic material or organics in the water. We mentioned a number of them before, the bacteria, virus, fungi, and so forth. That is a category water contaminant.

The primary one that causes disease that we are trying to get rid of and we have done such a good job in this century at getting rid of.

The problem is that the byproduct of chlorination is very hazardous to your health. When you combine chlorine with organics you get organochlorides. Chlorine and organics make organochlorides.

The family of organochlorides is the second strongest carcinogen known to man. Two organochlories that have been banned that you are familiar with are DDT and Agent Orange. DDT was such a dangerous pesticide that it was taken off the market in the late 60's.

It was one of the first substances every to be legislated against. Agent Orange was used to defoliate tropical rain forests in lush Southeast Asia.

If you have any problem, comprehending the lethal capacity of these compounds, I would encourage you to pick up any publication devoted to Nam Vets and you'll see that twenty years later an unprecedented number of these unfortunate brave souls are still coping with the deleterious effects of organochlorides.... and we drink them.
Three events in recent American history illustrate the dangers and concerns over the organochloride THM's (trihalomethanes).

As mentioned, organochlorides are the second strongest carcinogen known to man and they number in their family DDT and Agent Orange.

In 1973, Congress was so concerned about these byproducts of chlorination, the THM's, that they appropriated 100 million dollars to the EPA to sub out to different laboratories that they might do research to find other substances that are effective as primary and secondary water disinfectants.

One of the things that they found is that ozone erradicates viruses in water approximately four thousand times more rapidly than chlorine and that chloramine, which is a combination of chlorine and ammonia, is a residual disinfectant that substantially reduces the amount of THM's that are in the water.

The second event took place in the Los Angeles area.

In southern California officials found that there was an incidence of throat cancer that was several times the national average. They attributed this to the high amount of chlorine that needed to be added to the water to make it safe after it traveled down the Humboldt Aqueduct, the hundreds of miles to L.A.

Then more disinfectant was added to get it through dozens of miles of piping and out to the people. By the time the the water reached the tap the trihalomethanes were so concentrated that the association between the high incidence of throat cancer and the THM's became apparent as a public health hazard.

They replaced chlorine as a primary disinfectant with ozone in order to eliminate the THM problem. The result is the largest ozone water treatment plant in the world. An interesting property of ozone is that, if organic chemicals are in present in the water ozone will help to break them down.

The third event took place just two years ago. The FDA put into force a regulation that required all milk cartons be made out of oxygen bleached paper, which means hydrogen peroxide or ozone as opposed to chlorine.

They did this because of the residual THM's that were in the paper of the carton and making their way into the milk and then into the bodies of children. These three events demonstrate the concern over THM's that is shown by professionals nationwide.

One aspect of the THM debate that needs mention as a side note is this. We know these things don't break down in light, they are not water soluble, and every time you add chlorine to water to kill organics, you get trihalomethanes as a by-product.
The only way to get them out of any solution is to find fat or adipose tissue to absorb them. This brings to mind your hot tub or pool where you are continuosly adding chlorine, continuously forming trihalomethanes in increasing amounts, and the only way to remove them is by dipping your body in and soaking the THM's into your fat.

So if you do have some type of arrangement for bathing or swimming, you may want to make sure that you use ozone or hydrogen peroxide to treat that water instead of chlorine.

One of the things that we did not list as a water contaminant is chlorine. Chlorine is not really one of the categories of water contaminant, however, it does have a bad reputation. A lot of the people who sell water treatment equipment stress the removal of chlorine.

I have closely reviewed toxicology reports on chlorine and found that it is not overly hazardous for you at the concentrations to which we are exposed. In fact, a small amount of chlorine is probably good for you, provided that the chlorine is added to purified water so that no THM's are formed.

In fact one of the founders of the holistic movement in the U.S., the man that coined the word "holisitc", Dr. Ray Evers, used to give his patients a teaspoon of Chlorox bleach in a quart of water for them to drink every day. It was originally felt that chlorine was responsible for the health problems discovered in epidemiological studies on drinking water.

When they undertook laboratory studies on the topic, they used laboratory grade ultra pure water to add chlorine to. They did not find the same problems. This would lead us to conclude that the problems identified in the population sutdies were likely a result of the THM's that are formed when disinfecting real world water.
In fact, a large number of the things that comprise the oxygenation modalities, such as hydrogen peroxide, ozone and stabilized oxygen, are all primarily water disinfectants.

This line of reasoning makes wonderful sense. If you can disinfect water with something, and your blood is 83% water, why not use a water disinfectant to clean up the water in the blood. Chlorine is likely to be as effective, though less desirable, than the oxygen methods for disinfecting the water in the blood.

Let's talk a little about water treatment methods. We should touch on localized problems first, such as iron, sulphur, and sulfites.

If you have a localized water problem it's probably the talk of your neighborhood, because your neighbors have it as well. Most of these have solutions that are readily available in the form of special filtration media. Ask your nearby helpful hardware man.

A word on water softening - which is an ion exchange whereby sodium replaces heavier harder metals in the water. This is terrific for your clothing, your dishwasher, your hot water heater, and your washing machine, but it is not great for your body.
We pay particular mind to minimizing sodium intake in our diet to reduce the the risk of heart disease. It would be a travesty to recieve a tremendous dose from your water. If you have a water softener, buy bottled water or switch to magnets.

agnets will do the same thing by making the minerals less active and less harmful to your machines without adding salt to your water.

A preponderance of the point of use (POU) water filters that are on the market these days are either block or granular activated carbon. Activated carbon is very good at removing chlorine and a small amount of the organic chemicals and heavy metals. It also improves the taste and color of the water. It is bacteriostatic as well.

Think of static. something with an electrical propensity to stick to something. Carbon filters trap bacteria.

A problem with a carbon filters, is that over a period of time you are running your water over a bacteria bed as well as over a carbon bed. To remedy this problem a number of manufacturers have silver impregnated the carbon filters as a bacteriacide.

Tests have shown that through a process known as eleution, these filters give up ions of a poisonous heavy metal - silver. Imagine that. Silver has an MCL (maximum contamination level) from the EPA of one part per million. As a heavy metal it is poisonous and a poison is a not good thing to add to a water filter.

The best carbon filters have either an additive of KDF, which is copper and zinc or bone charcoal. KDF and bone charcoal have the additional property, depending on the design and contact time of the unit, of removing a majority of the heavy metals, organic chemicals and trihalomethanes. We lean toward the bone charcoal because it is a more organic compound.

The combination of bone charcoal and activated carbon in a filter should also be accompanied with features that represent good design.

Your POU water treatment equiptment is something that you pay good of money for, and you deserve to have the ability to backflush the unit, disinfect it with hydrogen peroxide, and also change the filter media. This way you won't have to buy a whole new unit every two or three years. A well designed unit is serviceable and will provide value and safety for you.

There are three ways of removing minerals from water. They are mixed bed deionization, reverse osmosis, and distillation. All three of these are primarily designed to substantially reduce the TDS of the minerals in the water. We really don't want minerals in our water.

The minerals that are in water are TDS (totally dissolved solids) or in other words - they are rocks. Plants eat rocks. Animals eat plants.

The minerals that you are interested in have been through the photosynthesis process and they are known as organic minerals. The ones, principally, that are in water are inorganic minerals. Inorganic minerals precipiate out of solution between 88 and 105 degrees.

Your body is 98.6 degrees and making tiny little granules of deposit that stick to the plaque on the inside of your veins out of the minerals in your water. If you have ever seen the inside of an old hot water line or a used hot water tank, you can imagine what hardened arteries and kidney stones look like.

You really don't want minerals in your water. They are not toxic however, so their presence is not an immediate and overriding concern. If you have the means and the inclination to have a high quality water, you can use one of the three methods of mineral removal.

They are all reasonably expensive pieces of equipment. A reverse osmosis unit which generally runs two gallons of water down the drain for every one that it allows through, will give you water that is 20 ppm of TDS or less and cost between $250 and $450.

A water distiller can cost anywhere from $300 to $1500 and will give you water that is 10 ppm or less. A main disadvantage of distillation is that a number of the chemicals that are in water have a boiling point lower than 212 degrees, so the toxic chemicals are either just moving from one chamber to the other or being dispersed into the air, which you breathe.

In addition, a lot of people use air conditioniug, and distillers produce heat in the living space. This can lead to bigger electric bills. If you do use a distiller, put it outdoors or somewhere that is ventillated that is not inside your living environment.
Both RO and distillers are expensive pieces of equipment. If you had an expensive car, you would not put cheap gas in the tank.

You would put quality gas in. By the same token, if you have a distiller or an RO unit, you should use as a prefilter a carbon and bone charcoal unit. This way you are running a quality water in and you are only removing the minerals. That would be good for insuring that you have top grade water as well as making your equipment last a lot longer.

While we are on the topic of removing minerals, we should discuss deionization. Every mineral has either a positive or negative charge to it because it is a metal.
The deionization involves the use of anon and canon resin beds to attract the positive and negatively charged minerals. This is used principally for polishing water that has already been through RO or distillation in laboratory and food processing applications. It is not cost effective for individual use.

An other method of water treatment is ozonation. I would like to say that to date there are a number of myths regarding ozone where water treatment is concerned.
I would like to clear a number of them up. Ozone will chelate out heavy metals and fluoride. It will kill bacteria and oxidize chemicals, but it will not do it in the concentration that you have available to you in your home. Ozone works on water contaminants in this order.

First of all, it eliminates all bacteria and fungus. Once that is done, secondarily it begins to flocculate out any type of inorganics. These include sand, metal flakes, dirt and turbidity. The things that are make water cloudy. From there ozone will begin to oxidize any of the organic chemicals.

Then it will begin to chelate out heavy metals and gradually will cause the minerals to combine into salts that precipitate out of the water. Eventually you will have ultra pure water. We are talking here about tremendous concentrations and lengthy contact times.

Ozone and oxygen pumped into water as in the counter top devices that are available today, are principally for re-oxygenating and re-ozonating the water.
This puts the nature back into the water, as if it were frothing in a mountain stream. After water has been been treated and sent through long dark pipes, chlorinated and filtered out, there is very little oxygen left in it. Fish don't breathe water.

They breathe oxygen. That is why you bubble oxygen through water in a fish tank. Your stomach is 40% more efficient at assimilating oxygen than your lungs are. It's a very good idea to oxygenate your drinking water. It'll put a wiggle in your walk. In home counter top ozone units these days are principaly for re-oxygenating and re-ozonating the water to put it into a natural lively oxygenated state. We have yet to see a whole house ozone unit.

If you're drinking tap water or lugging bottled water around you should seriously consider a point of use water filter that uses a combination granular activated carbon and bone charcoal.

We recommend an under the counter version because as your appreciation for quality grows you will want to add an RO or distiller.

An under the counter unit is more compatible hardware wise with these pieces of equiptment. Who knows, maybe somewhere along the way you'll pick up a counter top water oxygenator and be a real water wizard. There's nothing that compares with a frosty glass of oxygenated ulta pure water.