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WHEN A nasty parasite called cryptosporidium from the intestines of sheep and cattle got into the water supply on the Isle of Wight last year, 30,000 people had to boil their water for five days. A kidney patient had to be taken to the mainland for uncontaminated dialysis.
The bug, which causes stomach upsets and diarrhoea, is the kind of horror that tap water drinkers try not to think about.
The water companies say such incidents are unusual and point out that they are spending pounds 28 billion this decade to improve standards and eliminate such risks.
But if the supermarket shelves packed with Evian, Perrier and assorted mountain spring waters are anything to go by, the public is not wholly convinced. Neither is the European Commission.
"Without wishing to knock them, they are simply not tested in the way that tap water is," says a Thames Water spokeswoman of the bottled rivals which have tripled sales since 1988 and turned the water connoisseur against the tap.
"We're giving them a last chance to say whether they're going to toe the line," a European Commission spokesman said this week of the British Government's flouting of EC water quality rules.
The water companies are now stressing what they have achieved and are trying to shift the water quality argument. As the bills for improvements begin to come in, they ask whether consumers can afford the price of better water.
The industry's watchdog, Ofwat, predicted this week that water bills could rise by more than pounds 100 each year from 1995 in some parts of the country. "Big increases in bills for low-income households and for many pensioners would present real problems in affordability," said Ian Byatt, Ofwat's director general.
The environmentalists argue that this is not the point.
"To be fair, England is not the worst for water quality and it's not the best," says Friends of the Earth water expert Liana Stupples. "But we've got one thing that enables us to judge the standards of water. The law. The water in this country does not meet those legal standards, which were set to act as a minimum and protect human health."
FoE estimates 14.5 million people in Britain...