Pollution In Ganges River

Montana State University research about pollution in the Ganges River has reached the Supreme Court of India, producing some optimism among MSU scientists who study the 1,500-mile river.

"It’s nice to know that our work is being recognized by a government institute in India and being presented at the highest level," said Steve Hamner, research associate in microbiology. "Lots of things get done judicially in India." The Ganges River is considered a goddess, but Tim Ford, head of MSU’s microbiology department, said it has become a soup of pollution.

"It’s a beautiful river. It’s just really mucked up," he commented. The river contains untreated sewage, cremated remains, chemicals and disease-causing microbes, the researchers said. Cows wade in the river. People wash their laundry in it and drink from it. Ford said the Ganges has become the kind of place where genetic material could transfer between pathogens and create new pathogens.

"Wastewater treatment is critical to protecting human health from waterborne diseases," Ford said. "The Ganges River is a major source of disease burden in that region."

Hamner said MSU and a government lab in India each sampled the Ganges and found enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) bacteria. The bacteria known as 0157:H7 bacteria. It was first detected in the United States in 1982 after someone ate a tainted hamburger. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 0157:H7 now infects more than 73,000 people and kills about 60 people a year in the United States. The CDC said most of those illnesses have been associated with eating undercooked, contaminated ground beef, drinking unpasteurized milk, swimming in or drinking contaminated water and eating contaminated vegetables. The bacteria can cause dysentery and kidney failure. It occasionally kills.

Hamner learned this spring that a research institute in Lucknow, India reported its lab results to the Indian Supreme Court. In doing so, it referenced MSU’s findings and echoed MSU’s concerns. The Lucknow Institute tested a portion of the Ganges about 200 miles upstream from Hamner’s sampling.

He doesn’t expect to see a pure Ganges in his lifetime, but the Supreme Court involvement is encouraging, Hamner said, adding that he didn’t think the Supreme Court of India would have been as open if the report had come from MSU alone. "This is the best of things. It’s wonderful," Hamner said.

Ford said, "Getting regulators and legislators to understand the importance of not discharging untreated human waste into the Ganges River is critical to moving forward.
" Ford, a long-time researcher of environmental health, is planning to return to India in 2009 as chair of an American Academy of Microbiology Colloquium on Water and Health.
Hamner’s involvement with the Ganges began about five years ago when he decided he wanted to introduce himself to scientists at the Sankat Mochan Foundation. The foundation is directed by Dr. Veer Bhadra Mishra, a retired engineering professor and head of a Hindu temple. Veer has been recognized by Time magazine as a hero of the planet. He’s on the United Nations’ honor roll for environmental activists.

In early 2003, Hamner traveled to the city of Varanasi in north central India to meet with members of the Sankat Mochan Foundation. Hamner returned to India in 2004 and conducted a health survey and sampled the Ganges in Varanasi. Hamner sent the river water samples to MSU where Susan Broadaway tested them in the microbiology lab and detected 0157:H7 almost immediately.

http://desiglitz.com/forum/chai-time/21384-pollution-ganges-river.html

Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry.

Photo: Donald Milne
That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world's population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.

Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they're quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest's half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.

This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it's useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can't always be found where people need it, and it's heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world's freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.

Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth — more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living — has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.

One barrier to better management of water resources is simply lack of data — where the water is, where it's going, how much is being used and for what purposes, how much might be saved by doing things differently. In this way, the water problem is largely an information problem. The information we can assemble has a huge bearing on how we cope with a world at peak water.

That data already shows the era of easy water is ending. Even economically advanced regions face unavoidable pressures — on their industrial output, the quality of life in their cities, their food supply. Wired visited three such areas: the American Southwest, southeastern England, and southeastern Australia. The difficulties these places face today are harbingers of the dawning era of peak water, and their struggles to find solutions offer a glimpse of the challenge ahead.

On the descent into Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix's endless grid of streets and tract homes is etched into the desert floor like the imprinted surface of a microchip. When the sunlight hits at the right angle, the canals that zigzag across the landscape light up like semiconductor traces surging with electricity.

And Phoenix is sprawling at a rate that seems to rival Moore's law. In the 1990s, the metro area was growing at the rate of an acre every three hours. The population is expected to nearly double in the next 20 years. But cities, unlike microchips, don't double in efficiency every 18 months. A 2007 government report stated that staggering growth in the American Southwest "will inevitably result in increasingly costly, controversial, and unavoidable trade-off choices." The issue: how to parcel out a dwindling water supply.

The city's chief water sources are the Salt River Project and the Central Arizona Project, two massive water systems that bookend a century-long effort to hydrate the region. The Salt River Project began in 1903 with the Roosevelt Dam, which reined in the flood-prone waterway. Today, the SRP is a vast network of reservoirs, hydroelectric dams, and channels. As for the Central Arizona Project, it's one of the largest and most expensive aqueducts in the US, completed in 1993 at a cost of $3.6 billion. The 336-mile CAP canal diverts 489 billion gallons a year from the Colorado River, irrigating more than 300,000 acres of farmland and slaking the thirst of Phoenix and Tucson.

By Matthew Power
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-05/ff_peakwater#