Writing about drinking water! What rubbish? That would be your first reaction. Wait to think a bit about the less fortunate people in this world. More than eighty per cent of the world population does not have safe and clean drinking water, according to a recent UNIDO report. The World Health Organization has estimated that supply of clean drinking water to all people would prevent more than two hundred million deaths per annum and prevent another half a billion serious illnesses per year in the world. One could now gauge the extent of damage we are inflicting on the world population by not trying to make drinking water safe for them. The remaining twenty per cent of the rich world population could think that they are safe drinking bottled or mineral water from the springs!



Now comes the bombshell from North India. Earlier reports had detected unacceptably high levels of germs in the bottled water. In the Delhi region alone most of the bottled water is found to contain dangerously high levels of chemical pesticides! The certifying agencies could not detect this, as the standards set by them did not reach that level of sensitivity. This should not be a surprise at all and one could expect similar findings in other areas sooner than later. We use so much of fertilizers and pesticides these days that the former should eventually reach the drinking water table underneath. The two are interconnected.



The multi-billion dollar petrochemical industry would push fertilizers to the hilt. Fertilizers eventually would have to make the earth impotent! When these fertilizers and pesticides destroy all the germs in the soil, the earth would not be able to breathe and would become sterile. In addition, chemical fertilizers might help breed resistant strains of germs that eventually eat up the entire crop. Looks far fetched now, but is a definite possibility. Pesticides are another curse, as they need to be stronger and stronger as time passes, to make the mutated resistant germs to succumb. A day would come when all our efforts to get rid of germs would be defeated if we depend only on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.



To cap it, we are using large amounts of chemical detergents in various industries, which also would eventually reach the drinking water table underneath. Soap and detergent industry is the one that keeps up the myth that germs are here to eat us all up if not destroyed using their chemicals. This is far from the truth. Germs are our friends and they are there to help mankind. We depend on one another. If ever they have to be controlled we could do so by biological competition. The latter is Eco-friendly and prevents mutation that generates dangerous species of germs.



In some parts of the world, like the eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent and Bangladesh, poor people have only two choices. They have to either drink the surface water and get serious gut disorders or drink the deep well water that contains dangerously high levels of arsenic to die of chronic arsenic poisoning, while the rich and powerful drink bottled water imported from Europe!



Man can not survive without water. In fact, more than sixty per cent of the total body mass is water. Most of us do not drink enough water. This could be a great health hazard. Man needs about thirty-ml. water per Kg. body weight per day: may be more in a dry and humid atmosphere in healthy people. Those who are ill and are under medical supervision should follow their doctor’s advice regarding the amount of water to be drunk daily. We, the fortunate people that get clean water to drink, have a responsibility to our less fortunate cousins to see that they also get reasonably good water to drink. In India this should be our first priority. In the absence of universally clean water supply we could, at least, teach our villagers to boil their drinking water, while helping the government efforts to reach clean water to the needy.



Dehydration is one of the main causes of jet lag in long haul flights. Inside a pressurized cabin of the aircraft our body cells get dried up pretty fast. One needs nearly two-hundred ml. water per hour in such situations. Drinking alcohol, caffeinated cold drinks, tea and coffee, as also eating salted foods increase the demand for water inside an aircraft. Whereas billions of tons of water get shifted in the seas because of the gravitational pull of the moon, man’s body, which has more than sixty per cent water, also gets affected by the different phases of the moon! Such is the close link between water and human health.



Body’s immune system tries to help maintain reasonably good health even in the midst of dirty water consumption by the poor people. They would develop enough resistance, over long periods of time, on such water intake and survive many minor illnesses. However, dangerous germs like cholera vibrio might take a heavy toll of human life during epidemics. It is also reassuring to know that the quality of water for drinking need not be as pure as is suggested by the WHO. Having said that, one must hasten to add that our effort should be to give people water that is safe to drink in the long run. Drinking the arsenic rich deep well water, mentioned earlier, might not kill people in the short time, but in the long run it kills and kills for sure.



The difficult part is that slow arsenic poisoning might present in many bizarre forms to the doctor. Many a time the medical profession could get totally confused. With the present day chemical effluents from various industries pouring, sometimes, directly into drinking water sources, one could expect newer disease presentations. It might not just be arsenic but there could be any chemical in the drinking water, as all the chemicals used for anything under the sun would have to eventually reach the under ground drinking water table. This poses the greatest threat to the future health of the population and is quite worrisome. We must wake up and see how best we could avoid this calamity.



Unfortunately, nature did not intend mankind to drink seawater, which is plenty around. One of the important reasons is that it contains prohibitively high amounts of salt. Come to think of it man is spoiling his health by eating more damaging foods that contain much more salt compared to seawater. To give you a few examples: bread and other baked foods contain 50% more salt than sea water, soups contain 100% more, biscuit (even sweet biscuit) contains 100% more, but, more than all of them, is the western breakfast corn flakes, that contain 200% more salt than sea water!



In addition to all these are all preserved foods. Preservation of food depends only on its salt content. Chloride being a derivative of phosgene gas, when combined with sodium, it makes the most powerful germicide known to man. Any food that could be salted heavily could be preserved for long periods of time. One of the reasons why manufacturers add so much salt to corn flakes is to preserve its crispness as also to increase its shelf life. In a country like India the need for more salt, compared to the west, is not suprising. While in the USA every bowl of corn flakes contains 200 mg of sodium chloride, it must be much more in India. Preserved foods are one of the important causes of high blood pressure as also of other vascular diseases.



The rich who are deluded that they are drinking pure water inside the sealed bottles are in for a rude shock. In addition to the pesticides mentioned earlier, many of the bottled water are not from any pristine spring water source. Most of them are tap water purified, either by ultraviolet light or by ozone. Ozonised water could have a high content of oxidants, the bad elements that destroy body cells. May be to compensate for that the present pharmaceutical world sells anti-oxidant vitamins! Makes a lot of business sense, though.



In a country like India the health needs of the common man are only a few. Poor do not need five-star hospitals and hi-tech medicine. All that they need are clean drinking water, which tops the list, cooking smoke free dwellings, three square meals a day uncontaminated by human and/or animal excreta, and economic empowerment. Poverty is the mother of all illnesses. In addition, poverty cuts both ways being a double-edged weapon. While it causes more illness, it robs the victim of his/her ability to earn a living. Clean drinking water to them would be the government’s first priority. Poor pay for their poverty with their lives. Let us hope that the day is not far off when the less fortunate in the world get their basic necessities. Man, with his proclivity for comfort and his greed would, otherwise, one day destroy all God given resources of this world.