What is raw water?

Essentially, raw water is untreated water. This means that it hasn’t gone through any of the processes to remove harmful contaminants, like pathogens that can kill, or chemicals that can have a detrimental impact on human health. These could include petroleum, benzene, dry cleaning solvents, PCBs and high levels of nitrates from fertilisers.

Treated water, if you are lucky enough to have it, is a great thing: it’s expensive and complicated to provide, but it protects you from potentially fatal diseases. In most developed countries there are standards to which tap water should be treated, and that’s how tap water in developed countries is different from raw water.

Why are people drinking raw water?

Probably because of a lack of confidence in piped water, due to incidents such as the Flint Water crisis. Some water treatment processes like reverse osmosis, which is used in California, remove all naturally occurring minerals like calcium, magnesium and potassium, so perhaps some people are worried about that. However, all those minerals can be obtained by eating a balanced diet, so any perceived ‘benefits’ would be greatly outweighed by the risks posed by the potential presence of extremely harmful contaminants in raw water.

There is also a camp that believes fluoride - which is often added to water to help protect our teeth - is dangerous even at very low levels. According to the World Health Organisation, it is not harmful at the very low levels it is found in treated tap water and ironically, depending on where you live, raw untreated water could contain much higher, potentially harmful levels of fluoride.

One in nine of the world’s population do not have clean drinking water, with many having to fetch their water from ponds or by digging a hole in the ground. This puts them at daily risk of serious disease. Being able to turn on a tap and drink treated water protects us from the diseases that used to kill previous generations in the developed world, and still kill hundreds of thousands in the developing world who don’t have clean water.

For more information, visit WaterAid.

"The problem with the dangerous 'raw water' trend"