A glass of clean drinking water contains ten million `good’ bacteria which may help purify the water and keep it safe, a new study has claimed.
Researchers have found that our drinking water is to a large extent purified by millions of “good bacteria “found in water pipes and purification plants. These bacteria and other microbes grow in the drinking water treatment plant and on the inside of our water pipes, which can be seen in the form of a thin, sticky coating -a so-called bio-film. All surfaces from the raw water intake to the tap are covered in this bio-film.
“A previously completely unknown ecosystem has revealed itself to us. Formerly, you could hardly see any bacteria at all and now, thanks to techniques such as massive DNA sequencing and flow cytometry, we suddenly see eighty thousand bacteria per millilitre in drinking water,“ said Catherine Paul from Lund University in Sweden.
