Like many of you, the first time I took a drink of Philadelphia tap water on my first day here as a freshman, I got a bit of a surprise. You see, Philadelphia water is flavored, not with lemon or lime, but with what I soon learned to call "Philadelphia Phunk." To avoid the taste of musk in their drinking water -- or wooder, as I am told it is properly pronounced -- a great number of Penn students and other Philadelphia residents fill the pockets of Brita on a regular basis.
The phunk, however, is only one of many nasty surprises that can emerge from an otherwise innocent spigot; more serious things have come out of my tap before. In 1993, my hometown of Milwaukee was the site of an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis, a stomach-cramping, diarrhea-inducing and generally unpleasant week of gastrointestinal torture. I know it all too well, for the 9-year-old Kevin Collins was one many to become ill.
Cryptosporidium parvum, a single-celled parasite, got into our city water supply and sickened more than 400,000 people. Eventually, public health officials figured out what was going on and took measures to protect the city's water. However, this was not before roughly 4,400 Milwaukeeans had to be hospitalized and about 100 people died as a result of the contamination that likely started with cow dung.
Now, Milwaukee water is treated with ozone, making it some of the best and safest tap water anywhere. And while that is reassuring, biological contaminants are only one of many potential pollutants. For example, many Americans get their water from wells that have more minerals than you get in your average bottle of Evian. According to the Sierra Club, in 2001, industrial facilities released 141,172 pounds of arsenic compounds, 362,122 pounds of lead compounds and 220,800,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into our nation's lakes, rivers and streams.
And that's in addition to the arsenic that's already there. As The Christian Science Monitor wrote last week, "In a scene repeated in more than a dozen countries from Hungary to Chile to the United States, tens of millions of people are drinking from arsenic-tainted wells. ... Some have called it the largest mass poisoning in history." It's not just cities like Milwaukee that have to worry -- rural water quality is a serious problem as well.
And what about the Philadelphia Phunk that we here at Penn have all learned to love, or at least tolerate? A 1997 study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated a correlation between turbidity (cloudiness) in water and emergency room visits for gastrointestinal disease among children in Philadelphia.
True, correlation is not causation, but between the way Philly's water tastes and the way it looks, it is hard to think that it is pure H2O coming out of our dorm room taps.
If President Bush gets his way, water quality is only likely to get worse. According to a report prepared by the Sierra Club and other organizations, under the Bush administration's budget proposal and a House Appropriations Committee bill, in fiscal year 2005 Pennsylvania would lose $19.4 million in funding for a critical program that helps build water infrastructure.
If you're well-to-do, these problems are not so significant. You can buy Brita pitchers to filter city water or drill a new well if your old one is contaminated. If worst comes to worst, you can buy your water bottled.
Water pollution, therefore, is a problem that does not particularly affect the rich and the strong, but rather the poor and the weak. In Milwaukee, for example, those who died were those with weakened immune systems -- the elderly and AIDS patients. Moreover, as a general rule, poverty is not conducive to the ownership of filters or the consumption of Evian. In short, water quality affects the poor, both rural and urban, as well as those who are already vulnerable because of sickness or age. In this, water quality is a question of justice.
What can be done? It's pretty simple: Put less pollution in the water and put more money into getting it out. Instead, the Bush administration is doing the opposite, and in this, we as a nation are failing to exercise proper stewardship over both the health of our environment and the health of our citizens. Simply put, in the richest country in the world, you should not have to worry about cryptosporidium, lead, mercury, arsenic or anything else but water coming of the tap.
You certainly should not have to worry about it more because of how much money you earn.
Kevin Collins is a junior Political Science major from Milwaukee. ...And Justice For All appears on Tuesdays.
