Be careful! Drinking aquifer water could kill you.
Almost half of the world’s population, including as many as 90 million people in the U.S., rely on ground water to drink, feed their animals, and water their crops. Excluding anthropogenic contamination, the major natural contaminant concerns are arsenic and fluorine levels. However, there is another, more subtle killer in ground water. That is naturally occurring organic contaminants that are being leached by aquifers from associated low-rank coals, Ingestion of minute concentrations of these compounds over a period of decades have killed thousands of people in the Balkans and a similar situation exists in the southwest US, primarily in the state in which I live – Texas, as well as in NW Louisiana and SW Arkansas. Does this situation occur elsewhere?