AsiaXPAT (Hong Kong) - The Hong Kong government says our tap water is safe, but then they would, wouldn't they because there are large numbers of poor people in HK who cannot afford bottled water.
Our tap water is piped in from the East River, in Guangdong, China.
Guangdong is home to over
60,000 factories, and where there are tens of thousands of factories, there are massive amounts of chemical effluent and other toxic waste products.
Does anyone believe that factories in China are safely treating their waste products properly?
Here's a photo of a river in Guangdong:
This
Reuters article caught my eye this morning and got me thinking Hong Kong's tap water.
A report indicates that levels of perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are off the charts in America's drinking water. PFAS are believed to cause liver damage, cancers, and low birth weights in humans.
“It’s nearly impossible to avoid contaminated drinking water from these chemicals,” said David Andrews, a scientist at the Environmental Working Group and co-author of the report.
“Everyone’s really exposed to a toxic soup of these PFAS chemicals,” Andrews said.
The Environmental Protection Agency in America has been aware of this problem for nearly two decades but has, to date, taken no action.
Last year, the US Department of Health issued a report indicating that there were ten times the safe limits of PFAS in the water supplies of many major cities in the US.
The White House and the EPA attempted to stop the report from being published.
Last year, the cities of Flint and Newark were found to have levels of
lead contamination in their water many times the national safety standards.
If that is the quality of water than is circulating through the taps in America, and Hong Kong's tap water is sourced from China, I am thinking our drinking water is best avoided.