The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recommendations for treating water after a natural disaster or other emergencies call for more chlorine bleach than is necessary to kill disease-causing pathogens and are often impractical to carry out, a new study has found. The authors of the report, which appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, suggest that the agency review and revise its guidelines. Daniele Lantagne, who was at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the time of the study and is now at Tufts University, and colleagues note that after natural disasters such as floods, clean water can be scarce. To prevent the spread of water-borne illnesses, the EPA currently recommends “bottle, boil, bleach” in case of a water emergency. That is, people should turn to bottled water as a first resort. If that’s not an option, then they should boil available water to disinfect it. As a last resort, they should add “1/8 teaspoon (or 8 drops) of regular, unscented, liquid household bleach for each gallon of water.” But, as the researchers point out, 1/8 of a teaspoon is not the same as 8 drops. And both amounts are higher than CDC and World Health Organization
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