Saturday, January 26, 2008

Some Water Issues

I will be going to the Philippines Tuesday as a short-term consultant with the World Bank! It will be my job to document some of what the World Bank is doing and how it impacts people on a local level, giving the issues a human voice and perspective. It should be very interesting, and I'm creating a new section of Defrosting Apathy to share it with you. In the meantime, I've been getting a lot of travel advice. The thing everyone seems to say is not to drink the water.

I even attended a meeting for travelers (my Austria trip looms as well), in which a local health official laughingly made reference to "Montezuma's Revenge."  I've since had a change to discuss it with the hosts of the meeting, who agreed that "ha ha ha, we can't drink their water because they're poor" was inappropriate.

At first "why not?" seemed like a stupid question.  Further, is there a "Washington's Revenge?" - Do people in other parts of the world have trouble drinking my water?  I also wondered, do locals drink the water? Do they suffer as a result, or have they built up an immunity to the bugs that live in it? Does it hold back the Global South?  Can something be done, like creating more infrastructure?

Up to Date Patient Information: General Travel Advice says travelers can get infectious diarrhea (traveler's diarrhea), hepatitas A, and trichnellosis. They also say don't drink, make ice cubes with, or brush the teeth with local water. Drink boiled tap water. Don't eat unpeeled fruit or raw vegetables. I knew most of this -Thomas Mann's character Aschenbach died as a result of eating the strawberries that represented the lure of the Global South.

The Center for Disease Control discusses the science behind traveler's diarrhea, and the implication is that the traveler should be wary, but not the local. They also include an unsurprising map:
Focusing on travel diarrhea implies that its a travel issue, that in fact locals are able to adapt to non-potable water.  However, UN Millennium Development Goal #7, ensure environmental sustainability, includes a stated goal to reduce by half the number of people living without sustainable access to clean drinking water.  

The World Health Organization notes some interesting H2O statistics in a fact file:

- 4 in 10 people globally live without access to clean drinking water.  This is "getting worse because of population growth,  urbanization and an increase in domestic and industrial use."
-By 2025, 2 billion people will live with a water shortage. 
- The WHO recommends a level of 500 cubic metres of water per person per year, for healthy and hygienic living.
- Water scarcity means people rely on unsafe sources of drinking water.
- "Poor water quality can increase the risk of diarrhoeal diseases including cholera, thyphoid fever, salmonellosis, other gastrointestinal viruses, and dysentery.  Water scarcity may also lead to diseases such as trachnoma, plague and typhus.  Trachnoma, for example, is strongly related to a lack of water for regular face washing."
- "Water scarcity encourages people to store water in their homes.  This can increase the risk of household water contamination and provide breeding grounds for mosquitoes - which are vectors for dengue, dengue haemorrhagic fever, and malaria and other diseases."
- Good water management reduces breeding sites for disease vectors, reducing disease.

So to answer some of my earlier questions, no, I can't drink the water there.  People who come to the US don't face issues with our water, despite what the government of San Jose is having difficulty realizing.  Locals really shouldn't drink the water there either, but they have to.   There is no immunity, it does hold back the Global South, and something can be done.  However, there is not enough water to go around, so it will become increasingly difficult to keep what we do have clean.  

The answers raise an important new question: how do you live and care for your family without clean drinking water?

39 comments:

Dennis said...

Hi Liz, dennis here, the guy from the University of southeastern Philippines.

I would like to share my view on the report of "water quality" particularly in the Philippines.

Yes, it's true that there are some parts in the philippines where water is contaminated by disease-causing bacteria and deadly chemicals. However, this fact can't be used to generalize the water quality in the whole region. In fact, here in Davao (my place) we have the second most potable water in the world.

I would like to question also the validity of the report. There are claims, though unfounded, that some of the reports on water quality are being manipulated to project that the quality of the water is poor. Thi is to attract people to buy bottled water. This issue is apparent to profit-oriented countries where consumerism is very high. (Most of the bottled water companies are owned by multinationals and influential filipinos).

inspite of these reports (true or founded) the government is not doing anything to solve this problem. There are empirical data available yet they are not being used to improve the quality of water.

Liz said...

Dennis,

Thanks for responding. It was great to talk to you and the rest of the group, and left me thinking about a lot of things.

I appreciate your comments. I also started to question the validity of the reports I cited while I was there. At least they seemed overcautious; I never had a problem with the water I brushed my teeth with, for example. On a few occasions, I drank tap water and it was fine (by no means scientific data, just an observation). I suspected conditions in the area had improved since the reports were written, and now they were concerned about legal liability if they changed it.

But I think what you're saying about manipulated research is highly likely. Now we're back to the role of the university, aren't we?

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