Abstract
Expanding industrial, agricultural, and recreational activities have accentuated a built-in paradox where more and more water is needed but less becomes available at the required quality. It is not only quality that has to be preserved and ameliorated but quantity. Because a certain level of quality can be assured in a technologically advanced era and because proper quantities for the same community activities are reckoned with does not mean that the total water needs of an area have been satisfied. We must also be concerned about equality and this cannot be achieved until water in the proper quality and quantity is available to meet every segment of community need, industrial, domestic, and recreational.While many of the waterborne diseases have been laid to rest, physicians and other enlightened professional and lay groups have become increasingly concerned about viruses and the wide spectrum of chemicals now reaching the water contact cycle. At the present level of exposure, water pollutants do not seem to have a significant acute effect on community health with the exception of nitrates, which can cause methemoglobinemia and death in infants. Less well-defined, however, is the potential for chronic effects caused by long-term, low-level exposure. Nevertheless, the call is loud and clear for a revision of drinking water standards whose requirement can be translated more directly into measurements of water quality. which will be more refined as to specific contaminants. Equally as loud is the plea for bacterial standards for bathing beaches, based on sound epidemiologic data, How soon these pleas will be heard and responded to is, today, a matter of conjecture.
Published Version
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