Sunday, July 26, 2009

Whew...Cancer and Bottled water?

"In the United States, plastic water bottles are regulated by the FDA as "food contact substances" and held to the same safety standards as food additives.This means, among other things, that the FDA has reviewed test data on the safety of the plastics used in water bottles -- including the potential for hazardous chemicals leaching or "migrating" from the plastic into the water -- and established that they pose no significant risk to human health. The water itself is also tested and must meet basic quality standards similar to those set by the Environmental Protection Agency for public drinking water.That is not to say that bottled water is absolutely free of contaminants, nor that chemical leaching never takes place. Studies done on water bottled in FDA-approved polyethylene terephthalate (PET), for example, did find trace amounts of potentially hazardous substances believed to have migrated from the plastic. The important point to take away, however, is that these amounts were very small and well within the safety limits set by FDA and EPA regulators. According to Dr. Rolf Halden of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, consumers face a much greater risk from potential exposure to microbial contaminants in bottled water -- germs, to you and me -- than from chemical ones."
American Cancer Society: Plastic Water Bottles http://www.cancer.org/docroot/MED/conten…

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