Get up right now, pour yourself a glass of water and drink it. If you return to your chair in less than 30 minutes, walked less than a kilometer in safety and did not become ill, your water meets most of the definition for safe drinking water, as published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, as of 2006. Safe drinking water is more goal than reality in many places around the globe.
Mineral Pollutants
The Safe Drinking Water Act, or SDWA, was voted into law by the Congress of the United States in 1974, and reaffirmed by re-authorization in 1996. This set of regulations, definitions and enforcement requirements is intended to assure safe drinking water delivery by the nation's almost 170,000 public water systems, or PWSs. Maximum mineral content, specially those known to be toxic, like lead, arsenic, uranium and others, and petrochemical contaminants, are specified at levels scientifically tested to be less than those causing illness. Continual monitoring and reporting by the PWS network is required. If you want to know whether your PWS meets the mineral pollution standards for safe drinking water, request a report.
Biological Pollutants
Safe drinking water should be free of human and animal waste, according to the European Statistical Laboratory in their report titled "Access to Safe Drinking Water," published in 1996 as a follow-up to the 1992, United Nation's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in which the United States also participated. They stated that lowering "the faecal risk and frequency of associated diseases" is a fundamental of worldwide safe water definitions, and a goal in providing safe water.
Source Protection
The definition of safe drinking water begins with safe, protected sources, according to a document published in 2010 by the World Health Organization, WHO. Achieving this goal worldwide by 2015 is the work of the Global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water, GLAAS. A protected source is a spring, river or water body safe from contamination by human, animal, natural or industrial wastes. Source protection also includes safe distribution systems. In 2010 over 2.6 billion people lacked adequate sanitation, depriving nearly 900 million people of safe drinking water.
Source Distance
UNESCO's and WHO's definition of safe drinking water requires proximity to users. To obtain 20 liters, or a little over 5 gallons, of pure, clean water every day should require you to travel no more than one kilometer, or about three-fifths of a mile, to the source. The definition also stipulates the round trip for water should require under one-half hour.
Travel Safety
The short walk to your kitchen is probably free of thieves, muggers, terrorists and the hazards of wild nature. But UNESCO reports than in some parts of the world the trip for safe drinking water can, but should not, require travel through dangerous urban streets or unsafe countryside. The definition of safe drinking water includes safety to fetch it.
