Clean water – like infected water – can also be a problem
Waterborne illnesses like swimmer’s ear, norovirus, and Legionnaires’ disease sicken over 7 million Americans, hospitalize more than 100,000, and kill nearly 7,000 each year, a new report from the enters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates. The germs rack up billions in health care costs. (1)
“It’s important to think about more than just the water we drink when thinking abut preventing waterborne disease. We breathe in water in the air, and we bathe, swim and play in water, too,” lead author and CDC epidemiologist Sarah Collier said. (2)
By far, the waterborne disease that most sickens Americans is swimmer’s ear, also known as otitis externa. It accounts for about two-thirds of all cases, causing an estimated 4.7 million illnesses annually. Swimmer’s ear is basically an infection of the external ear canal, caused by germs that colonize the canal when water gets stuck inside. Swimmer’s ear may just seem like a minor nuisance, but these infections can be excruciatingly painful, and they cause more than 20,000 hospitalizations per year.
People can prevent waterborne germs at home by flushing faucets and showerheads if they have not been used recently, cleaning disinfecting, and maintaining all devices that use water, and communicating with their water utility. Swimmer’s ear can be prevented by keeping our ears dry, such as by using earplugs while swimming Collier said.
After swimmer’s ear, norovirus infection is the second most common waterborne illness, causing around 1.3 million cases a year. It’s very contagious, capable of spreading from close contact as well as through contaminated food and water. Another diarrheal disease, caused by water loving parasite Giardia, is the third most common, sickening an estimated 415,000 Americans each year.
All told, every year, waterborne illness is estimated to sicken 7.15 million people in the US, send 601,000 people to the emergency department, hospitalize 118,000, ad kill 6.630. These ER and hospital visits add up, leading to $3.33 billion in direct healthcare costs annually. (2)
Of the seven most common waterborne diseases in the world, diarrhea is the central symptom. The latest research shows that diarrhea is the second most common cause of death for children under the age of five, causing more childhood deaths than malaria, AIDS, and measles combined. (3)
The seven leading waterborne diseases include: typhoid fever, cholera, giardia, dysentery, escherichia coli (E.coli), hepatitis A, and salmonella. (4)
Lack of clean water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are major causes for the spread of waterborne diseases in a community. The fecal-oral route is a disease transmission pathway for waterborne diseases.
Poverty also increases the risk of communities to be affected by waterborne diseases. For example, the economic level of a community impacts their ability to have access to filtered water. There are South Asian communities that do not have the economic stability to provide clean water and sewage.
Can Water Be Too Pure?
Then there’s the other side of the coin. Can water be too pure? If you’re a farmer the answer is yes. Desalinated water is one example. The purity drawback is that desalination not only separates the undesirable salts from the water, but also removes ions that are essential to plant growth. When desalinized water is used to replace irrigation water, basic nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and sulfate at levels sufficient to preclude additional fertilization of these elements is missing.
Farmers can also be affected by run-off that is too pure. Snow melt run-off from the Sierra Nevada, Cascades or other mountains can be too pure. A lack of calcium in the majority of soils due to snow-melt irrigation in water, or poor quality subsurface water, is leading to serious problems in California. (5)
Here’s another example where absolute purity of water can be a problem, Philip West of Louisianan State University reports, “With productive waters, it is quite apparent that absolute purity is out of the question. If the Mississippi River passing Baton Rouge and New Orleans consisted of distilled water there would be no seafood industry such as we now have in Louisiana.
Without copper ‘contaminating’ the water there would be no oysters. Traces of iron, manganese, cobalt, copper, and zinc are essential for the crabs, snapper, flounder, shrimp and other creatures that abound in Gulf waters. As unpleasant as it sound even the run-off from the fertilized fields of the heartland’s and the sewage discharges into the Missouri, Ohio and Mississippi River systems pollute and thus ultimately nourish the waters.” (6)
References
- Sarah A Collier et al., “Estimate of burden and direct healthcare cost of infectious waterborne disease in the United States,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2021
- Ed Cara, “Waterborne germs sicken millions of Americans a year, CDC report finds,” gismodo.com, December 16, 2020
- “7 most common waterborne diseases (and how to prevent them), lifewater.org, May 23, 2019
- “Waterborne diseases,” en.m.wikipedia.org, January 24, 2021
- Brent Rouppet,, “Irrigation water: a correlation to soil structure and crop quality,” Crops, August 2006, Page 22
- Raphael G. Kazmann, in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Jay H. Lehr, Editor, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 311
About the author: Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has written for The American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, Hawaii Reporter and Canada Free Press.
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