Health fads come and go, but drinking more water (and less beer and soda) is one of the few things that's unequivocally good for the human body. It should be as easy as putting a glass under the tap, but what kinds of potentially harmful chemicals lurk there? News that 3M is paying more than US$10 billion (351 billion baht) to clean "forever chemicals" from municipal drinking water isn't helping our confidence.
Susan Richardson, a former EPA chemist now at the University of South Carolina, has been working to establish a big-picture view -- using an instrument that can measure the relative abundance of different kinds of chemical contaminants. She's been following the forever chemicals (polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS) for 30 years, but she's come to realise that for most of us, these likely pose a minor threat compared to something else -- the chemicals that form spontaneously as a byproduct of water disinfection.
