Is water no longer safe?

Factual Questions
1

Hey, Medics?

Ever since I got my first contact lenses (decades ago, in junior high school) I rinsed them first, then added a drop of lens solution, then stuck them in my eyes. That’s what the optician taught me to do. A few years back, my optometrist (a completely different guy in a different city and county) noticed me going through my routine while putting in a sample lens. “Good heavens, don’t do that!” he said and, when I asked why he said, “Because the water might contaminate your lenses – and then your eyes.”

But, since I had been doing the same thing for over thirty years, I ignored him and continued rinsing my lenses before inserting them.

Ever since I started learning to cook (decades ago, around the time I started junior high school) I learned to pull chicken breasts out of the package, rinse them off, and then start pulling the skin and bones away from the meat. It was just part of the preparation my mother taught, and she ran a fried chicken restaurant for years (until Colonel Sanders moved in across the street). Not too long ago I clicked on one of those click-bait links below our discussions and was taken to a site that warned STOP DOING THIS TO YOUR CHICKEN!!! and discovered that, while Julia Child and other celebrity chefs of olden days very specifically and routinely told viewers to wash chicken as part of the preparatory exercise, modern culinary experts advise against the practice. Why? Because there’s a good chance that, even though the flash-freezing process used in packaging chicken parts might kill off any bacteria in the bird, there’s a good chance that the water coming out of the kitchen sink may contain salmonella and/or botulism and/or something worse. Thus, even though you’re cooking the meat, there’s no sense introducing potential problems from molds, bacteria, and/or their waste products into your meal.

Well, okay, that got my attention. In fact, the specifics and detail of that article helped make the argument quite convincing. So I no longer wash the chicken when I prepare it. Furthermore, I no longer rinse my contact lenses before inserting them, now that I know specifically what could be lurking in my tap water even though I might think I’m making something clean.

Which brings me to the question:

Ever since I took my first Basic First Aid course (decades ago in [del] junior [/del] high school) I’ve learned to treat mild burns, abrasions, and lacerations by washing the wound first, then applying whatever bandages (and possibly topical medicines) are necessary. Is it no longer advisable to wash off a wound? Was it never really safe, or have we just been building up higher concentrations of germs in our water supplies to the point where using tap water is now too much of a hazard to be worth the risk?

—G?

2

Probably depends where you are and how reliable your local water treatment and inspection agencies are. But proper cooking should kill any nasties in the chicken, and presumably you’d use some sort of antiseptic on a cut or graze anyway.

3

As far as I understand it, the recent advice to avoid washing chicken is because:
[ul]
[li]It’s unnecessary - cooking it will destroy bacteria, if it’s done properly - and if the meat is so severely contaminated that cooking won’t make it safe, washing won’t make it safe either.[/li][li]It splashes contamination around from the meat into your sink. If you then wash drinking glasses in the sink (or worse, if you have plates drying on the rack right next to the sink), they can pick up pathogens from this splashed material.[/li][/ul]

4

Remember that advice like this has to apply to everyone who reads it. Tap water often has chemicals in it that may not be good for your eyes, so your optician is correct.

5

Don’t rise your contacts with tap water. That has the potential to be bad. Tap water has whatever your city adds to it such as Chlorine and Fluoride and things that it doesn’t add to add such as microbes, lead, rust, crud from pipes etc.
You can rinse them if you want, but just use your saline solution.

As far as chicken, you’re absolutely not going to hurt it by rinsing it. Also, I’ve never, ever heard of salmonella or botulism contaminating a municipal water system. That would create a major outbreak, on the order of being national or international news. You were talking about Julia Child, so I’m guessing you’re old enough to recall back in the 90’s when Milwaukee’s water system got hit with Cryptosporidium. 25% of the people in the area got sick from one little bug. While accidents and incidents do happen; in general this is all taken very seriously. You can look up your city’s water distribution plant and read the reports. It’ll show you what they put in the water, what they test for, how much of everything they’ve found in the system etc. It may even tell you how they clean the water.
In short, drink it, cook with it, shower with it, don’t purposely put it directly into your eyes on a daily basis if you can avoid it.

As for the burns. Your question is kind of moot since our/your water system isn’t actually full of germs, but also medicine changes very rapidly. If you want to know what’s best to do for a burn, you’re best bet is to talk to someone (and I know we have plenty around here) that’s currently up to date in the field. You’ll probably also find that in 5 or 10 years the advice may be different.

6

Maybe it’s just me, but if you don’t bother to say your location, how can you expect anyone to reasonably comment on what’s likely in your municipal water? Salmonella? Botulism? Something worse? Are you in central or South America? Because I’m pretty sure none of those things you mentioned are in any of the water in the USA.

So, like, where are you? If you’re in America I’m going to ask for a cite that there are such things present in the tap water.

7

If you live in the US and are not in an endangered zone (like the poor folks currently suffering from hurricane effects) and there hasn’t been a warning about water quality due to some accident or other, your water ought to be reasonably free from disease germs. As the Center for Disease Control points out on this page, the EPA (which hasn’t been gutted yet) is responsible for ensuring that public water supplies in the US are safe:

https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/public/drinking-water-faq.html

Furthermore, you can request a Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) regarding the condition of water in your area:

Here’s the page listing acceptable levels of contaminants:

It certainly does happen that bad things occasionally happen, or you get spectacular excursions like the case of Flint, Michigan (whose CDC report I’m now curious to view), but these tend to be well-publicized.

I still wash my chicken and fish after taking them out of the package. Veggies, too.

8

I like my hometown, I like my hometown of water, but the city’s water is not clean, water purifier is still necessary

9

Interesting juxtaposition.

10

Yup. Even if the food itself is clean, I don’t know who’s touched the thing. There could be dozens of people handling it between the farm and me. Hell, there’s already 3 or 4 people who’ve handled it just between the store and home.

11

I had no idea there were people in modern developed countries who wash their raw chicken before cooking it. Sounds like a great way to cross-contaminate your whole kitchen.

12

Water doesn’t need to be completely sterilized to be safe to drink. The eye may simply have more stringent requirements than the digestive system. You wouldn’t rinse surgical tools in the sink either.

13

It’s not even about stringency. Normally, if something gets in your eye that shouldn’t be there, you blink and your eyes water and between the two, it gets washed out. But contacts can keep things sandwiched between the lens and your eyeball instead of getting washed out. This is usually brought up as more of a concern when doing things like swimming in a lake. My concern with washing contacts in tap water would be that I could be leaving minerals on the contacts that will make the contact uncomfortable, harder to see with, or dry out my eye. Saline solution is like 2 bucks a bottle and distilled water is even cheaper for a gallon. There’s no reason to use tap water for lens cleaning.

14

I wash it. Much for the same reasons as **DCnDC **gave us. More importantly (to me), I dry it well so I’m starting with a clean slate as far as seasoning goes. I do that with all the meat that I’m going to cook. We’ve got a special colander we use just for the ground beef (I’m kidding about that one).

15

That often happens when you cut out the context.

Not if you use enough common sense to not drip it all over your kitchen or set your ready-to-use food directly in the sink basin before sanitizing it. Keep in mind, when you rinse your fruits and vegetables in the sink, particularly leafy greens, leeks, cantaloupes (because of the webbed skin) and a few other things like that, it’s e.coli, salmonella (once listeria) etc, that you’re attempting to clean off. Yeah, there’s dirt and mud, but there’s manure runoff, bird crap and anything else that can happen to a bunch of produce that has been left out in the open for a few months.

16

The complaint about washing the chicken is totally absurd and paranoia its raw chicken, its already contaminated with bacteria, not only from chicken poo and the knife going from skin to flesh, but also because theres always bacteria in flesh ANYWAY. The reason to be sure to keep uncooked meat seperate from anything else in the kitchen is TO KEEP IT AWAY FROM CONTAMINATED OLD STUFF, last last weeks left overs, or a rotten fruit, so as to keep it reasonably fresh for storage, and to prevent the chicken contaminating OTHER STUFF IN THE KITCHEN. So they might have said “you will contaminate the sink with salmonella, and they wash their fruit in there”.

Well if they said that, then they are really not meant to drop food into a sink, just let the water flow past… If they put food in the sink, they’d better clean it very well before use. Its basically a matter of ensuring the chicken blood does not remain on the bench or sink.

Washing the chicken though, is only slightly useful. We don’t bother. Any contamination , eg of the skin’s fat or dead skin cells, onto the flesh, is rather minute and irrelevant after cooking… its just not significant compared to the worry of having bugs in the flesh !

The eye, now that is meant to be wet with salty water. What happens when you put tap water on the lenses is that your lenses will rob your cornea of salt.

Also, the tap water could add contaminants ( pipe flux ) or debris (rubber,brass, rust flakes ? ) to the lense and that could injure your eye. Ok we wash our faces, but thats after we rub the stuff on our hands and face. So there’s be warning, and its rare and anyway you blink and its gone. . But with contact lenses you trap the debris against the eye all day …

17

sigh

You gave an example of contamination. He denied there could be contamination.

What context ?

18

Well the water in the Great Lakes might be safe for depressed fish:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2017/09/06/antidepressants-detected-in-fish-brains-in-great-lakes.html

19

Sigh yourself, let’s look at more than just a sentence.

The OP implied that our water systems were practically made of germs and bacteria with lines such as:
“Because the water might contaminate your lenses – and then your eyes.”
“there’s a good chance that the water coming out of the kitchen sink may contain salmonella and/or botulism and/or something worse.”
and
“have we just been building up higher concentrations of germs in our water supplies”

I suggest that they’re not and despite how you read it, they’re actually pretty safe:
"I’ve never, ever heard of salmonella or botulism contaminating a municipal water system. That would create a major outbreak, on the order of being national or international news. You were talking about Julia Child, so I’m guessing you’re old enough to recall back in the 90’s when Milwaukee’s water system got hit with Cryptosporidium. 25% of the people in the area got sick from one little bug. While accidents and incidents do happen; in general this is all taken very seriously. You can look up your city’s water distribution plant and read the reports. It’ll show you what they put in the water, what they test for, how much of everything they’ve found in the system etc. It may even tell you how they clean the water.
In short, drink it, cook with it, shower with it, don’t purposely put it directly into your eyes on a daily basis if you can avoid it. "

The line you compared it to said the same thing:
“So, like, where are you? If you’re in America I’m going to ask for a cite that there are such things present in the tap water.”
I’m not sure how you’re reading those as juxtapositions. The only way I can see that is if you’re inferring from elbows that ‘there are such things present in the tapwater’ is the same as ‘there can never be/never has been a contamination’.

20

The OP is mixing up different water issues.

Why are you so afraid of water?