Do we need water fountains in every High Street?

I DO NOT welcome fresh drinking water dispensers in towns and cities to reduce the overuse of plastic bottles (Mail). I have seen how unhygienic this can be at sports clubs, where people drink from a bottle and then push it on to the tap to refill it, leaving cold and flu germs for the next unsuspecting person to catch. Name and address supplied. COUNCILS and businesses will have to install ‘water replenishment stations’ to refill bottles. Were these once called taps?

ANDREW WRIGHT, Morton, Lincs.

I AM a retired biomedical scientist and must warn people about placing bottles under a tap because of crosscontamination from the neck of the bottle. The mouth is one of the dirtiest parts of the body and bacteria from a used bottle can be transferred to the tap and into the next person’s bottle. ELEANOR WILLIAMS, Shepperton, Surrey.

I HOPE there will be free water fountains at airports, where bottled water costs more than petrol. T. C. THOMPSON, York.

WHY do people have to carry bottles of water around? There is little danger of dying of thirst, even on the hottest day of the year. Will the cost of supplying ‘free’ water fountains be added to homeowners’ water bills? RONALD BALL, Farnborough, hants.

ON A schoolboy hitch-hiking holiday in France, our French master warned us not to drink the tap water, as it was not purified to the same standards as ours. How we laughed that we had to brush our teeth in vichy water. Since then I have always held the conviction that drinking bottled water is codswallop. The stuff that comes out of our taps is as good as anything you can buy in a bottle. DAVID EDWARDS, Leighton Buzzard, Beds.