Contaminated water

The water we use everyday has the potential to carry a lot of things we may not notice.  Contaminated water can carry heavy metals, chemicals, and more things that can harm us.  One of those things that we don’t think about too much in our everyday lives is waterborne disease.  Waterborne diseases can come from a huge variety of sources.  Some of the most common like cholera can often come from sewage entering our drinking water.  This can happen in water treatment plants when they fail to fully decontaminate their water.  It can also happen in  when the water is in transportation if some contaminate becomes entrained in a pipe carrying clean water.  It can also happen in ground wells.  This means some form of sewage, or waste has seeped through the ground and contaminated a well from which someone is pulling water.  While wells are sometimes contaminated in the United States, this is usually something more common in third world countries.  This is usually due to lack of infrastructure.  Treatment of waste is something that often plagues these undeveloped countries.  For the same reason, this waste is sometimes actually discharged into water sources like rivers.  Certain climates actually allow the bacteria or microorganism to reproduce in the water.  This is something we in Ohio saw this summer in Lake Erie.   Heavy rains this summer surpassed our infrastructure’s capacity to carry water.  This resulted in a large amount of sewage/septic water entering Lake Erie.  This combined with high summer temperatures created a perfect breading ground for bacteria.   In 1993, an outbreak of intestinal disorders and diarrhea occurred in Milwaukee and labs discovered the presence of cryptosporidium in the water system throughout the area. The protozoa infected about 400,000 people and it caused the most serious waterborne disease outbreak in the United States. Cryptosporidium cysts are difficult to detect, even in a well-equipped lab.  And in 1993 we did not have all the equipment we have today.  So this was a fairly difficult problem to solve.  The cyst formed by the protozoa is also difficult to kill because they encapsulate themselves in a durable coating. 

It was recommended residents boil their water for an extended period of time or use bottled water. Dysentery is also a harmful condition that has affected the U.S. in the past.  It is actually caused by two different organisms.  One of these is an ameba and the other is a shigella.  A person can have symptoms of Dysentery after ingesting as few as 10 of these organisms.  It is a very tricky thing to rid the water system of it once it is entrained because it is resistant to many water treatment methods.  Since sanitary conditions in the United States have improved greatly this is something we don’t see as much of anymore.  However, human waste (that has been treated) is occasionally spread on fields in some states as fertilizers.  It is obviously impossible to kill every organism in that mixture.  And occasionally a few cases will pop up in the area due to a heavy rain resulting in contamination.