A member of a Chinese family living on the southern island province of Hainan began vomiting blood after drinking some bottled water, so the family decided to test the rest of the water on a chicken.

The chicken drank the rest of the water from the bottle, and died within a minute, according to the Beijing News. Authorities in the province were investigating the incident.

The bottled-water mishap adds to the growing safety concerns surrounding products made in China. To date, the safety of Chinese-made toys, toothpaste, seafood, and other products have been in question.


China is becoming well-known for their toxic foods and other consumer products, like fish raised in raw sewage, tainted toothpaste, and contaminated pet food. Their bottled water, it seems, may also be suspect based on this report.

China is also known for their rampant pollution, and the people in this province may have had no other safe source for their water other than to drink it bottled (which, it seems, was not safe either).

In the United States, people often rely on bottled water for different reasons -- because of convenience, and also because they falsely believe it to be healthier than tap water.

In reality, about 40 percent of bottled water is regular tap water, which may or may not have received any additional treatment.

In addition, the metal antimony (a silvery white metal of medium hardness) has been found in many commercially bottled water brands. This potentially dangerous metal is thought to leach into your water from bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) -- antimony trioxide is used as a catalyst in the manufacture of PET.

Storage temperatures, water pH, or exposure to sunlight could all increase the concentration of antimony leached into your bottled water.

The other major reason why I don't advocate drinking bottled water is the enormous strain it's putting on the environment .

You don't need an advanced degree in astrophysics to understand that you were designed to drink water from near where you live. It makes absolutely no sense to waste energy and transport water from half-way around the world when you can process local water to make it nearly as good as any water in the world.

With the price of gasoline rising faster than nearly everyone's paycheck, it has become painfully obvious how much it costs to transport water over long distances. Not only are there wasteful costs in transporting this water, but also enormous amounts of energy are used to create the bottles that store the 50 billion or more gallons of water used worldwide each year.

Then, of course, there is the quandary of what to do with all of those empty bottles.

Sadly, many of them are left to slowly degrade in our environment, where they're literally turning our oceans into plastic and releasing a deadly mix of plastic chemicals and additives into our food, air, water, and soil.

Sadly, many people in China and other impoverished regions of the world do not have access to clean water, and have no choice but to take their chances with the water that's available, bottled or otherwise.

If you're reading this, you must have access to the Internet and are likely fortunate enough to live in an area of the world where you can purify your own tap water by installing a reverse osmosis filtering system into your home.

I have been searching for over seven years to find a water filtration system I can confidently recommend to you. I am still searching and hope to have one in the next four months.