by Jaimela King

Created on: January 13, 2009

A return trip to a small South American country, after an absence of twenty years, revealed a drastic deterioration in the water quality in some villages. Women were using water from the rivers adjacent their homes, for their daily household chores, as they have been doing for many years. This time, however, the water was visibly dirty and littered with discarded shopping bags, dead animals and a plethora of human waste.

Young children were being unceremoniously dunked in to these waters for bathing, in the absence of plumbing, even though they live in fairly decent homes and parents manage to send their children to school wearing approved uniforms. It is not surprising that this is also a country where the mortality rate for children under 5 is 64, for both sexes. The the average adult life expectancy is 63 years for both sexes. This is Guyana, also known as, "Land of Many Waters"

Half of the world's population are affected by polluted drinking water. A commodity, as essential to life on earth as the air we breathe, is making us sick. Unhealthy rivers result in some 250 million incidents of disease and deaths, in the 5 to ten million range, on an annual basis.

Healthy rivers have become a luxury that many communities can no longer afford. The choice is often between taking a chance on contracting a disease from unclean water and possible death, or dying from dehydration and starvation. In some areas, it is the difference between the ability to pay for water and plumbing facilities and utilizing contaminated water.

Many unhealthy rivers are laced with rocket fuel, arsenic, PCB's, pesticides and human waste. Pathogenic bacteria, parasites and viruses, when ingested from contaminated water, threaten millions of human lives in many forms, including typhoid fever, Cholera, smallpox, measles, influenza , chicken pox and Ebola.

Rivers in Asia have the dubious distinction of being the most polluted in the world. In one half of China's seven biggest rivers, the water is so polluted that it is undrinkable, while 85% of the rivers in Bangladesh are smeared by arsenic contaminated groundwater.

In regions where unhealthy rivers provide the main sources of drinking water and food, contamination is widespread seriously endangering the health and lives of residents. In addition to unclean drinking water, cropland, and thus the food harvested from the land, is also subjected to contamination from the seepage of untreated sewer.

A recent study of Plankenburg River in South Africa,

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