[Opinion] Water Quality Fraud

Joseph Priestley, a British pastor and chemist, discovered in 1722 that if charcoal is burnt with a certain amount of air, one-fifth of the air is consumed making carbon dioxide. He concluded that the rest of components of air are irreverent to combustion. What remains most in the combusted air is nitrogen. After the discovery, carbon dioxide has been used to make soda water and nitrogen to make laughing gas used as an anesthetic. However, if nitrogen is dissolved into drinking water, it becomes a different story.

Nitrate nitrogen found in underground water is a by-product of organic nitrogen oxidation by bacteria and oxygen. To put it simply, it is a component found in human or animal excretions. If we ingest nitrate nitrogen, it causes oxygen depletion as oxygen become less cohesive with hemoglobin.

In particular, if children drink the water, it can cause cyanosis, a bluish discoloration of the skin or developmental disturbance. In the Czech Republic, 115 children who drank milk whose nitrate nitrogen content was over 70ppm suffered from cyanosis and nine of them died.

The prosecution caught a number of test institute employees who manipulated underground water quality inspection results, researchers at a government-run environment research institute who connived at manipulation, and water developers who bribed the researchers. Water quality examination organizations have fabricated inspection data about underground water in 1,753 places. Inspection organizations either swapped specimen or changed inspection data whose nitrate nitrogen content exceeded 10ppm, the standard for drinking water. Some of the water contained 17 times more nitrate nitrogen than the standard amount.

The poisonous water flowed into households, schools, children care centers and towns. Experts believe washing food ingredients with substandard water was the likely cause of Noro virus which triggered the worst outbreak of massive food poisoning this year. 90.7 percent of the households use tap water as of last year. Some large food suppliers use subterranean water sources because of water charges. Throwing toxic materials into water is as serious a crime as manipulating water quality date at experimental labs. People who tricked the public into drinking contaminated water are the public enemy.

Chung Sung-hee, Editorial Writer, shchung@donga.com