Here is why you need a water filter in Costa Rica

If you do a quick search on google, you’ll get a lot of results suggesting that water quality in Costa Rica is great. As with everything we find on Google, we should, however be vary of these search results. Relatively speaking, if you compare public water in Costa Rica to that, which is available across many states in the US or generally industrialized metropolitan cities etc, it does look less alarming. For instance, Costa Rica doesn’t add chloramine or fluoride in its water, which is, of course, good news. 

Unless a pristine spring rather than ASADA is feeding your water supply, this doesn’t mean however, that, it’s safe skip a shower filter or – even worse – drink tap water if you live in Costa Rica.

And here is why.

1. Costa Rica chlorinates all its public water.

Chlorine has been linked to reproductive issues, various cancers, heart  tacks and problems with the immune system.

2. Chlorination is not a reliable way of disinfection in Costa Rica

Chlorine levels differ quite a bit depending on where in the country you are. (p. 18 and 28, or see graphs attached). This leads to following problems:

• too high residues of chlorine in the water, which leads to over-exposure to the side-effects of chlorine 

• too little chlorination, which leads to outbreaks of harmful microorganisms in the public water system. E.g. as of last available water quality report (2017), 6% of all samples (p.15) contained too high level of fecal matter and Escherichia coli bacteria

3. Even chlorinated water contains contaminants

Some contaminants are always present “at very low permissible levels“. You’d ideally want to have zero levels of any contaminants in the water as even trace amounts accumulate over time adding to the toxic load. This will lead to our bodies purging these toxins in one way or another eventually causing what we call dis-ease

4. Chlorinated doesn’t equal drinkable

Even with chlorination, in up to 11% of cases, the quality of supposedly drinkable water doesn’t measure up to the set out criteria (p. 88 if you’d like to read more)

As a mater of fact, in 67% of cases, tested public water quality showed some non-confirmities. They affected nearly 40% of the population! In ASADAS network alone, these irregularities were as high as in 74% of cases (p. 8) In majority of cases, these irregularities were due to inadequate levels of chlorine

5. Water quality reports are out-dated

As a matter of fact, the last nationwide report is as of 2017. As quality of water changes all the time, this means that we have no up-to-day knowledge about the current state of public water.

6. One thing is to measure, quite another to do it properly

ASADA , as a large governmental agency, has its flaws and cannot be fully trusted as you can see from their own internal evaluation:

El AyA ha demostrado problemas con sus sistemas de información, ya que la información presentada en la mayoría de los casos no concuerda o se presenta en formatos distintos que no son compatibles entre regiones o incluso entre el Laboratorio nacional de Aguas y la parte operativa del AyA.

(p. 85 if you’d like to read more)

So what to do?

All tap water, regardless of where we live, unfortunately is contaminated to some extent. 

Even the most natural waters can contain so called organic (as opposed to industrial) contaminants. They include hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell), uranium (earth leaching), iron, lead, radon, radium, etc.  

If we then look at the in-organic/industrial contaminants, on the other hand, there are over 80,000 chemicals used in society today. For this reason, a powerful water filter is not only necessary to deal with existing and known contaminants, but also serves as insurance against potential future contaminants that can appear in the water. 

Given the extent of industrial contamination present in our environment, the choice we have today is either use a filter (air filter, water filter) or become filters ourselves. 

You can find high quality water filtration solutions that take well care of the contaminants present in the public water in Costa Rica here

We are water, my friends!

Con amor,

Milda & Co