PURE WATER DANGEROUS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1419, 23 October 1923, Page 6

PURE WATER DANGEROUS.

Chemically pure water is dangerous to drink, according to the declaration of a number of French navy-surgeons who have been making careful investigations. After so much has been said during the last decade about the danger of impure water, such a declaration sounds almost preposterous, yet these French navy surgeons give logical reasons why there is danger in drinking chemically pure water. To make water chemically pure it has to be distilled, and the continued use of distilled water as a beverage reduces the strength of the physical organism, says the Pall Mall Gazette, because while it is free from all germs, it contains nothing but oxygen and hydrogen. The mineral salts are left behind during the process of distillation, and the mineral salts are really indispensable. "As long as life persists in the body," these surgeons declare, "the elimination of mineral salts goes on, and this means the rapid demineralisation of the organism.'* Demineralisation, it is explained, leaves one's system in such a state that the natural tendency is to become tubercular. It was found that there were numerous cases of tuberculosis among the young sailors in the French navy, and this was, after long investigation by the surgeons of the navy, attributed to the demineralisation of the water. Few people continually drink chemically pure water, and for this reason the dangers could not well be learned until the discovery was made. There are a number of ways in which the germs in water may be eliminated, and at the same time the mineral salts left in the fluid. Distilled water is scarcely palatable at the best, as it is these very necessary mineral salts that make it really palatable.