Obama faces task of keeping our water safe
By JOAN ROSE
In the idiom of our day, it’s not very sexy. It doesn’t make headlines. It doesn’t stir many political emotions. Yet it is one of the most important and potentially most costly health-related issues facing our nation, and one of the greatest challenges facing the new administration and the nation’s governors.
I refer to the need to continue to supply safe, clean drinking water for our fast-growing population — billions of gallons a day — at a time when threats to our water security are increasing and the infrastructure for delivering the water to our homes, schools, hospitals and places of work is everywhere crumbling.
Replacing thousands of miles of old, rusting and leaking pipelines — sometimes 100 years old — is essentially a local and state issue. But cumulatively, it is a serious national problem, requiring major investment, planning and construction on a national scale. Clean water is essential to all of our lives. Ensuring its future availability should be a priority for the new head of Department of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle, and the heads of Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.
So far, we have been lucky. But a serious recent outbreak of e-coli in Colorado was a reminder that even in states with the most impeccable safety records, breakdowns are occurring with growing frequency and vigilance is essential to prevent a recurrence of waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera that claimed so many thousands of lives in the past.
Do we have the expertise to prevent this? Yes. Do we have the technology? Yes. What we need to prevent a future water supply calamity is the political will — and yes, billions of dollars of investment to restore and expand our water infrastructure. It is hard to think of a more urgent use for future federal funds.
Great record
Looking back, this country has a great record. The fact that our whole population of more than 300 million can today take clean drinking water for granted, wherever in the United States they happen to live, is an achievement difficult to overestimate. It is a tribute to the many scientists, engineers and public health officials who made it happen and to the country’s far-sighted investment in the development of our vast water infrastructure.
It is also a tribute to those researchers, here and in Europe, who discovered that chlorine was a safe, reliable and affordable disinfectant that killed dangerous bacteria in the water and essentially eliminated waterborne diseases, literally saving the lives of thousands of infants and children who otherwise, each year, faced painful deaths before ever reaching the age of five.
This development — the use of chlorine to make drinking water safe — has been described as probably the greatest advance in public health in the history of our country.
Few of us working in the field would argue with that characterization. It is worth remembering that in the early 1900s, waterborne diseases were still rampant and claiming thousands of lives each year. Attempts to purify water often ended in failure. Raw sewage was often dumped directly into the rivers and lakes that were also a source of the region’s drinking water. Little surprise, therefore, that life expectancy hovered around the mid-40s.
The big breakthrough in eliminating waterborne diseases and almost doubling our life expectancy came just over 100 years ago. In 1908, Jersey City, New Jersey, became the first municipality in the country to chlorinate its water supply.
The results were dramatic. Within a few years, death rates from waterborne diseases plunged by 90 percent and life expectancy soared. It is an anniversary that has passed almost unnoticed, but for those of us concerned with public health, it is an anniversary worth celebrating. Chlorine is still used throughout the country to keep our drinking water safe.
Aging systems
But while our drinking water today is among the safest in the world, we certainly cannot relax. As noted above, our aging wastewater and water distribution systems are often cracked and rusting and pose an increasing threat to public health. Much of our water infrastructure needs replacing an enormous task. We are now facing new sources of contamination from various sources. And we urgently need to increase our investment in the research and development of water science and technology. New approaches are increasingly necessary.
Safe drinking water is important not only for the health of our population, but for our economic prosperity and quality of life. Sexy or not, the new administration cannot afford to ignore this largely unseen but very serious challenge to its governance.
X Joan Rose, a microbiologist, is the director of the Center for Water Sciences at Michigan State University. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.