China's drinking water not threatened, ministry says

Official: Monitoring shows problems near surface, not in deep underground aquifers

China's deep underground drinking water sources are safe, an official at the Ministry of Water Resources said on Monday in response to a news report suggesting that more than 80 percent of the water in China's aquifers is too polluted for human consumption.

The official, Chen Mingzhong, said monitoring does not show that underground sources of drinking water are threatened, since most of the country's water for human consumption is extracted from deep underground, not near the surface.