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Water treatment systems are becoming more popular as people become more aware of the health risks associated with the contaminants in their water. What health risks, you ask? I could write for a long time, and scare you to death about instances of sickness and death due to problems with our water supplies in the United States. I'll just mention one really scary one, and then move on. In Milwaukee in 1993, over 400,000 people got sick, and over 100 died, when a parasite called Cryptosporidium got in the city's water supply and wasn't removed by its water treatment facility. Terrible occurrences like this are very rare, fortunately. Not so rare is the incidence of chemicals in our water. One research group has found some 2100 chemicals in the water of our major cities. Fortunately, most of them are present in very low concentrations, and only a relative few of them are present in any one sample of water. Not all of the contaminants in our water are known to be dangerous, but many of them are known toxins and even cancer-causing agents. Even if the levels are low, we don't know the long-term health effects of exposure to all this stuff, and we especially don't know what happens, and what new secondary chemicals are formed from the combination of dozens or hundreds of primary chemicals. As an example, our municipal water treatment plants put chlorine in our water to kill disease-causing bacteria. All well and good-- that works really well, and saves millions of lives every year. However, when the chlorine meets up with organic material in the water, it forms things called trihalomethanes, that are not well and good. If "good" chlorine can create bad stuff in our water, who knows what "really bad" stuff might get created when already "bad" chemicals combine in all sorts of strange ways. Here's where whole-house water treatment systems come in. The right kind of whole-house water treatment systems can filter out virtually all the contaminants that may be in your water. They'll get rid of the chlorine and trihalomethanes. They'll get rid of VOC's ("Volatile Organic Compounds") formed as gasoline and pesticides and household cleaners break down. They'll filter out the lead and other heavy metals. They'll remove bacteria and parasitic cysts. Here's the part that most people miss when they start investigating water filters: whole-house water treatment systems clean and purify the water at every tap and faucet and showerhead in your home-not just at the kitchen sink, which is where most people install a home water filtration systems. Most people don't realize that we can easily get more chlorine on and into our bodies from our showers than from the water we drink. The chlorine in our shower water ages and dries the skin by stripping it of its natural oils. Not only that, but as we shower, the hot water opens the pores of our skin, and allows the chlorine and other chemicals to be absorbed into the body.
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