Water World Can Be a Scary Place to Drink

James Laughlin
Editor

A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said up to 2.5 million Americans yearly are stricken by giardiasis, a gastrointestinal disease which can be transmitted through drinking water, food, or contact with contaminated water.

In looking for additional information on the report, I went surfing the Internet looking for recent articles on water-borne disease and contaminated drinking water. What a scary trip!

Perhaps the scariest and most disgusting disease I wish I had never heard of (and will happily share with you!) is the dread guinea worm disease typically found in north Africa. I won't go into the gory details, but imagine ingesting worm larvae that can grow into adults three feet long and live in the flesh just under your skin!

In 1986, an estimated 3 million people were infected with guinea worm disease. A campaign by world health organizations led to a 95 percent drop in new cases by 1995, but even now nearly 100,000 cases a year are reported, primarily in Sudan and surrounding countries.

Recent debates over the proposed arsenic rule here in the United States seem insignificant compared to the problems of Bangladesh, which faces the "largest mass poisoning of a population in history" because of arsenic contamination of its drinking water supplies, according to a recent World Health Organization study.

Bangladesh's problems with arsenic is doubly tragic because it results from good-will efforts to reduce the incidence of water-borne illness in the country. Millions of Bangladesh residents died or became seriously ill each year from cholera, diarrhea and other waterborne diseases because of contaminated surface water. To solve the problem, the government and health organizations dug five million wells around the country to give residents access to "safe" ground water.

Unfortunately, the ground water underlying much of Bangladesh is laced with high levels of naturally occurring arsenic.

"The scale of this environmental disaster is greater than any seen before," according to Allan H. Smith, professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley. He estimated that from 33 million to 77 million Bangladesh residents were at risk from diseases caused by arsenic - ranging from skin lesions to cancers of the bladder, kidney, lung and skin and cardiovascular problems.

"Water may be the source of life. But in Mexico, it is also a cause of death," according to a recent article by the news agency Reuters. The article reported on a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

The OECD said Mexico's drinking water is an environmental catastrophe, often fouled by industrial and domestic waste. A study by the organization estimated that one third of all gastrointestinal problems suffered by Mexicans could be traced to water supplies contaminated by feces.

Back here in the good old United States, giardiasis is also linked to water contaminated by fecal matter. Reports of the disease have risen from roughly 13,000 cases in 1992 to slightly less than 28,000 in 1997, according to the CDC, which started tracking the disease in 1992.

Vermont had the highest incident rate for giardiasis in 1997, with about 42 of every 100,000 people affected, the CDC says. New York had the most cases that year, with nearly 3,400 people reporting giardiasis.

Outbreaks of giardiasis tend to occur more often in late summer and early fall, but scientists aren't exactly sure why.

Symptoms of giardiasis include diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and nausea. They may lead to weight loss and dehydration. However, not everyone infected has symptoms. Symptoms usually appear 1-2 weeks after infection with the parasite. In otherwise healthy people, they typically last 4-6 weeks.