The Washington Post had an opinion piece worrying about why fewer and fewer people are drinking from public water fountains.

Fountains were once a revered feature of urban life, a celebration of the tremendous technological and political capital it takes to provide clean drinking water to a community. Today, they’re in crisis. Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading from America’s parks, schools and stadiums. The sense today, though, is that “they’re dangerous, they’re not maintained and they’re dirty.”

The article went on to talk, at length, about how safe tap water is.  But nowhere in the article did it talk about how safe public drinking fountains are.  More on that in a minute.

Liberals say they worry about this because of the cost of bottled water.

Bottled water is also expensive. Drinking eight glasses of tap water a day costs about 49 cents a year. If you got that hydration exclusively from bottles, you’d pay about $1,400, or 2,900 times more.

Liberals never seem to worry about the cost of so-called environmental or other regulations they impose, so when they say they worry about cost, it usually is a red herring (pun intended) for something else.

The disappearance of water fountains has hurt public health. Centers for Disease Control researcher Stephen Onufrak has found that the less young people trust water fountains, the more sugary beverages they drink[.]

Ah ha!  It's all about control.  As Mark Levin might say, the masterminds have decided we drink too much of y and not enough of x.  The problem, according to them, is choice, for us.

The reliance on bottled water rather than fountains also has serious environmental effects. According to the Earth Policy Institute, it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to create the 50 billion plastic water bottles Americans use each year.

Wow!

(That’s enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars for a year.)

Wow!

 Less than a quarter of those bottles are recycled.

Amazing!

And these statistics don’t even account for the fuel used in transporting the water around the country and the world.

Tremendous!

Okay, now we've gotten to the real reason.  Fear of global warming (which is imaginary), fear of running out of fossil fuels (we're good for at least a few hundred years), and fear of running out of landfill space (we occupy only 3% of the land mass of the globe).

Now what about the safety of public drinking fountains?  Turns out they are worse than toilets.

That water fountains are germy is nothing new; various studies have attested to that fact for years, including a 1993 study published in Pediatrics that found traces of rotavirus (a leading cause of diarrhea) in the fountains at daycare centers. Even more disturbing than that was a 2005 study conducted by the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF), a nonprofit organization involved in public health and safety awareness. After testing various areas around two elementary schools for bacterial content, NSF scientists found that the most bacteria-laden area wasn’t the bathroom, but the water fountain. They discovered 2.7 million bacterial cells per square inch, which was thousands more than any other area they tested. The toilet came in at number eight on the list. 

Consumer Focus Scotland conducted a 2009 survey on fountains in offices, schools, and other public areas around the UK and found that twenty-three out of eighty-seven samples showed bacterial contamination resulting from fecal matter

Given that, would any sane person prefer a drinking fountain over bottled water?

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.