It seems like you would get pretty nasty germs happily living in our plumbing (especially untreated well water).
I think about the water that can sit for prolonged periods in hot water tanks, stagnant water in dead end sections of the plumbing system (unused outside faucet etc), and the wet oxygen rich environment inside the faucet ends.
Yet you almost never hear about people getting sick from their water🤷🏽♂️
In: 1670
Tap water often contains low levels of microorganisms such as bacteria and amoebae but these are killed by your stomach acid. These microorganisms generally are not considered harmful.
It’s also important to note that your body has more bacteria in it by weight than human cells, and you probably consume bacteria all the time in certain types of food like yogurt, not all bacteria are harmful for you.
Well water is also prone to being contaminated this way, it’s just a fact of our ecosystem.
The human body is setup to tolerate a certain amount of contaminated water because we evolved to drink water from natural sources.
Your local authority constantly monitors the quality of the water and if levels of microorganisms gets too high they will treat the water with low levels of chlorine to kill them off. This is why tap water sometimes has the distinctive pool smell.
The amounts of chlorine they use are so tiny that the water is still perfectly safe to drink, but if you don’t like the smell you can boil the water or use a charcoal filter to get rid of it.
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