Water’s been associated with illness over the centuries. The deadly pathogens of typhoid and cholera, for example, are carried along in water. And in undeveloped parts of the world today the vast majority of sickness is sourced to fecal matter that gets into water.
The Covid-19 virus that disrupts our lives today is different. Water’s not part of the problem; rather, it’s part of the prevention. We’re told to protect ourselves by vigorously washing our hands many times a day.
Covid-19 is a contagion: the word derives from the Latin contages – “contact, touch.” In this case a viral infection moves from person to person via sneezes and coughs and touch.
Little else is known about the disease, however, which opens the door to all sorts of imaginative ideas, a recent one being that if you drink a lot of water after infection you’ll be fine. The BBC recently reported about this supposed remedy, which goes on the idea that drinking water every 15 minutes will flush the virus down the esophagus to where it can be killed by stomach acid. Gastric acid is potent, to be sure, but medical experts say that it won’t rid you of the virus.
Water, therefore, is neither a carrier of the coronavirus nor a cure for the illness that it brings on..
Still, in many parts of the world today water is a direct and indirect transmitter of disease, and that’s worth knowing if only to grasp what it takes to assure safe water.
To get a sense of the dimensions, check out “Emerging Issues in Water and Infectious Disease” – a report by the World Health Organization. Among other recently discovered contaminants, the report cites the nation’s troubling experience with cryptosporidium – a remarkable resilient parasite that due to human error and equipment failure in the Milwaukee public water system in 1993 caused 400,000 illnesses and 100 deaths. There’s no cure, nor a defense against that parasite except a healthy immune system.
Here’s another report about water and health from Lifewater, a California-based Christian organization that’s focused on safe water and sanitation issues around the world.
These and other accounts illustrate some of the many ways that diseases can get to us – get into us – through water.
Malaria, for example. That’s not a waterborne disease, but the mosquitoes that carry the disease use fresh and brackish water to breed. So, malaria is tied to water by hosting its carriers.
Another indirect tie between water and disease: Increasingly hard rains that have a way of overwhelming wastewater plants in ways that cause untreated fecal matter to get into rivers, sometimes upstream of intake pipes for public drinking water systems. Illness can come of that.
So, water and disease can have connections that aren’t always all that obvious. That’s true even in the case Covid-19.
For example, water and wastewater treatment plants need adequate staffing to operate as designed. But what if infection by the virus — or workplace precautions that we take against it — leave staffing too low to operate those plants as designed, hence open to error that can let pathogens pass through?
That’s speculation, of course. But alarmist? No, just something to think about when planning defenses against this frightening pandemic.