I was looking at a list of the countries where it is safe for travelers to drink the water. Not too surprising. USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, S. Korea, and Israel are the safe countries.
I have heard that several other countries have water that is suitable for locals, but not safe for tourists.
Are any countries working to fix this? What will be the next country to add to the list of safe water countries?
Do you have a link to that list? I’m missing several countries where, while not every source of water may be safe to drink, water in most middle-class locations will be.
Conversely, if we require every source of water to be safe before we can declare a country’s water to be safe, I don’t think there’s a single country that would make the list.
And yes, water treatment plants are being built around the world. This includes both drinking water and waste water.
It’s some years since I was in Australia, but on at least one occasion, they were advising people in Sydney to boil their water because the reservoir water had been contaminated with kangaroo crap.
There’s been similar situations in the US. Does that mean the US should be considered a country where water must be treated as unsafe by default?
Local water can be problematic for any traveller, especially those susceptible to water-borne problems like babies and the elderly. The problem is that even bottled water is not 100% safe.
Better to stick to beer.
The problem with the Sydney water was that newer, better methods for testing drinking water had become available. The same water that everyone had been drinking safely for 100 years suddenly became not safe.
Or “drinking almost safely”. Once the new testing methods became available, it was clear that some of the minor background of unattributable illness was preventable.
BTW, I remember that in the 70’s Taiwan was converting their tap water to “drinkable”. To me, the interesting point was that Taiwan had a culture of using boiled water (weak tea) for drinking. They had a reticulated water supply, but there hadn’t been any expectation that people would drink it straight from the tap: kids took their thermos to school.
–and now Aus has gone that way in reverse. All the school kids take a plastic drinking bottle to school. It just seems insane to me (in Melbourne), but that’s how it is.
And one of my Fathers friends was ex-French-foreign-legion. He was told to drink the wine. He was told that if he got sick again from a self-inflicted injury (ie drinking the water), he would be on report.