If I travel to the US (Let's say Los Angeles, Seattle and New York) how do I know if the tap water is safe to drink? In the EU I normally just ask a local. In Germany it's safe to drink but in the Czech Republic you might be better off drinking bottled water (last time I checked was ~10 years ago, sorry if it's changed).
Locals will also tell you vaccines will give you autism and wifi is making them sick so they need homeopathic medicine.
Better to go with facts over hearsay.
The EPA requires yearly water quality reports (called Consumer Confidence Reports) for all municipal water supplies in the United States. Specifically they are due by July 1st each year.
If I travel to Europe, how do I know if the local knows the water is safe to drink?
Unless you're in Flint, or a paranoiac, tap water in the US is safe. Period.
Flint's problem is not endemic, it was isolated. The article is really reaching - they cite 3 instances over ~15 years of problems in city water supplies. In 2 of the 3 cases it was caught and rectified quickly - Flint is the exception.
> Unless you're in Flint, or a paranoiac, tap water in the US is safe. Period.
Given the size of the United States that's a very brave statement. Water quality in Europe is typically measured on on commune level and even in countries like Austria which pride themselves for drinkable tap water there are incidents which cause tap water to not be drinkable at times.
The U.S. is huge but it's also filled with a lot of people and a lot of local governments, state governments, and of course a federal government.
If you want one independent source of proof that U.S. water is safe, consider that almost every U.S. child has blood work done on an annual basis. If elevated levels of lead are a problem, they would be detected at that time, as they were in Flint.
If your child is seeing a peditrician on a regular basis they will almost certainly test for lead levels at age 1 or 2. They do not test for it or do other blood work routinely after than unless high levels are found.
I remember getting a finger stick almost every visit to the doctor as a kid, but that was just for cell counts and maybe sugar that they did in the office, not a full panel of tests.
Yes, this is what I meant but phrased it poorly above. I guess a better way to say it is that almost every child has had blood work done an annual basis. But it reads like kids get a full blood workup every year, which is not true.
No, blood work is not an annual event for most children in the US. It's quite rare, which is why one doctor started testing as many children as she could to confirm that they were seeing spikes in lead levels.
In major cities in the US like the ones you name, it would be very unusual to doubt the safety of standard municipal tap water. In my home city, this is based upon my own reading of the annual water quality reports they put out. I filter a lot of my own drinking water for taste reasons, but it's un-necessary and I do not hesitate to drink from taps anywhere.
With the recent worries about BPA and other components of plastics, it's unclear if bottled water from plastic is safer than tap at the 99.9th percentile of paranoia. I don't know about exotic risks from bottled water in glass (radioactive Evian from Chernobyl?), but I assume they are there also.
Nonetheless, in my circle of friends, I do know people who drink bottled water because they think it's more pure. I also know people who don't use microwave ovens because of harmful radio waves, and others who do not use plastic containers or plastic-lined metal cans because of hormone disruptors in plastics. I think they're nuts, and they compensate by thinking I'm naive and complacent.
A close friend was an entrepreneur and evangelist in this space. I looked into it around 2008 and could not justify a significant level of concern relative to other risks. (Although "nuts" may be too strong...should say, "excessively worried".)
Re. Czech Republic -- nothing has changed, in the sense that drinking tap water was perfectly safe ten years ago, as it is now.
I suppose that demonstrates the dangers of your "ask some local" approach :)
Though the safety of tap water in CZ is well known, and has been well known for decades, and any local would tell you as much. So I'm not sure where that came from. Perhaps some temporary local incident?
Even Google may be a safer source of information on tap water quality.
The safe drinking water act requires water supplies to not only create reports but also distribute them to their customers. My water company mails them out, thats probably par for the course. Putting them online might be optional, but they have to distribute them to their customers.
A pretty good rule of thumb I've heard is that if there's huge multi-liter water bottles available in every supermarket, it's probably a good idea to not drink tap water. The smaller and fewer the water bottles, the better the tap water is.
Default to not drinking from taps directly. I live in Seattle. We only use tap water after filtering with a Brita Filter for drinking and cooking. When we are outside home, we either bring filtered water with us or buy bottled water. At restaurants, if in doubt we ask if water is directly from tap.
Since the flint lead news, I have been exploring how can I get my tap water tested on a routine.
Why?? Tap water is highly regulated, and 1000 times cheaper than bottled water. It does not produce tons of plastic waste (much of which is not recycled). It does not leach possible carcinogens like BPA, DEHA, or BBP. Furthermore, much of the bottled water comes from municipal tap water!
The Mayo Clinic says that tap water and bottled water are about equally safe. If you can't trust top-notch doctors, who can you trust?
This myth about bottled water being better needs to stop.
Actually just a low tech method. Asked my wife who is on Board of Homeowners Association (HOA) to find out if HOA has done any testing in the past or would consider sending incoming city water supply samples for testing annually.
I wouldn't trust that link. The end of the article contains a pitch for a dietary supplement, which is a giant red flag to me. The fact that the sidebar lists conspiracy theories such as "Obama is a sleeper agent" and "San Bernadino was a false-flag" is basically guilt by association.
