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water quality — English
The characteristics of water that make it either potable (safe for people to drink) or not potable, but suitable as drinking water for animals, or safe as irrigation water, or water that should not be used before treatment. Water quality is determined by the content of the water, that is, what impurities and other substances are present in the water. Water supplied as drinking water to people in urban areas is routinely tested. Water testing is these days a very easy and quick chemical analysis since easy testing procedures have been developed because they are used so often and by so many laboratories. Certain tests can even be done in the field, but their accuracy is not as high as proper testing in a well-equipped laboratory. Drinking water must meet stringent standards. These standards stipulate that the water must contain less than specific concentrations of certain chemical compounds, and may not contain any harmful organic material of which Escherichia Coli or E. coli is the most important. E. coli comes from faecal matter and causes potentially fatal disease in human beings. Its presence always indicates that raw sewerage is or was polluting the water supply. The standards for human drinking water are more or less identical all over the world, but in certain countries the standards are less stringently applied. Waste water from certain mining activities often contain radioactivity or arsenic or other hazardous substances (see “hazardous waste”) and may not be used for any purposes at all and have to be treated before being released to the environment. This is currently a very high-profile issue in South Africa since many mines are releasing hazardous waste water into the environment. These mines have never been under the legal requirements of our current, stringent environmental legislation and the mines’ waste treatment practices are therefore outdated and not in the interest of the environment or the people downstream of the point where they release their waste water. It is a consolation that only water of the very highest quality is used in the food industry and very specifically for the manufacture of baby foods and formula milk. The ordinary drinking water supplied to people in South African cities and towns, is of an excellent quality, but not good enough to use for the manufacture of baby formula and needs further purification before it might be used for that purpose.
