Aren’t there affordable ways to get clean drinking water? A gallon of bleach can disinfect 3800 gallons of water. 96oz of generic bleach at walmart is $0.99, that is 2850 gallons of clean water.
And what about purification by boiling? Are metal or glass containers and something that gives off heat that hard to come by? What about using solar power to heat a pot of water instead of a flame?
I don’t understand why waterborne bacterias still kill so many people if you can purify 2850 gallons with 99 cents of walmart clorox or a $10 mirror and metal pot can allow you to use solar power to boil water.
is there a problem with distributing water purification tools? Do people not use them? Is there not enough funding? is water purification more complex than bleach or boiling?
You sound as though purified, cholrinated, filtered and processed water is necessary for life. It isn’t. Sure, it’s nice, and there are nasties in natural water sources that can kill, but it’s not as though primitive man had access to much in the way of bleach or distillation equipment. The reasons many undeveloped areas don’t have “clean” water is because the processing is either uneconomical, or the risk of disease is too low to bother with, or both.
You are going to have to go to the source of you statistic and look up definitions. For example, the UN has “improved drinking supply” defined as:
There is more to having access to clean drinking water than using a mirror to boil it by the gallon. Having to walk 30 km per day to supply a family’s water needs seems a bit of a stretch for qualifying in the Access To Clean Drinking Water Club.
BTW, the Q-Drum is a great example of brilliant simplicity, if only a stop-gap measure to a better world.
Oh, that little DIY solar boiler / evaporation distillation project takes forever to produce any useful amount of water. Its utterly impractical for anything other than a 3rd grade science project.
I drank water straight from a natural well for the first two decades of my life. No chlorination was needed, and I turned out fine. And this was right here in the good ol’ U.S.A.
Now, it’s true that there are lots of people that lack clean drinking water. This is a product of poverty and economic disruption, war, or famine for the most part. So waterborne illnesses are generally occurring in very vulnerable populations, and these populations likewise are ones where solutions are less easy to apply.
Cholera & dysentery are one of the six most serious infectious diseases affecting the developed world.
Even if the solar panel method of boiling water takes forever, isn’t it better than doing nothing? And why don’t people just add a few drops of bleach to their water, i thought bleach killed bacteria, protozoa and viruses.
[QUOTE=Wesley Clark
Even if the solar panel method of boiling water takes forever, isn’t it better than doing nothing? And why don’t people just add a few drops of bleach to their water, i thought bleach killed bacteria, protozoa and viruses.[/QUOTE]
Hm, perhaps because bleach has to be manufactured, and FWIW, in general in many 3d world economies if they cant make it there, the pretty much do without as getting money to buy things can be problematic in amounts over the bare minimum…Heck, from what I understand, the clothing on their backs is even gone through several other people buying and wearing it before it gets to them. Talk about the ultimate in trickle down economy…
Why in the name of Ghu do you think many primative cultures DON’T DRINK WATER in the first place, they dring herbal teas/regular tea/coffee/HOMEBREWED BEERS … because the water isnt safe to drink… :smack: Americans have this thing about all little kiddies have to have milk…or they are seriously deprived [despite in general the population unless a herding culture once you get weaned you dont drink milk] and you need clean water to mix the nasty skim milk powder with…if you let the kids drink the normal tisanes/teas/small beers as culturally was done, you have a lot less problem. I would think that a people who culturally developed just fine for several thousand years in a location would know what to eat and drink if we left them alone…their problem isnt in their diet, their problem is in reproducing and surviving and outgrowing the population the land they are living in can support. Famines, plagues and warfare is the malthusian solution that nature had come up with to solve this little problem. Our scientific advances have caused the problem by making too many survive infancy, plagues and injuries that would have normally kept the population at a supportable level…
<donning nomex underoos waiting for the flames to start at my non-pc post.> :rolleyes:
Because bleach is cheap on the Wal-Mart shelf, when you make $30,000 a year. It’s a bit pricier when your annual income is about $500 a year.
Assuming, of course, you can get the stuff at all. You may be miles away from the nearest market, even in peacetime. In the middle of a war or civil disturbance, supplies of any kind might become impossible to get.
Good luck getting your off-brand Clorox then.
Things are hard to impossible in the Third World, Wesley Clark, and your glib little replies don’t make them any easier.
Without getting too far into Tinfoil Land… I expect there are plenty of places in the world where clean drinking water is only as far away as getting Giant Multinational Corporation X to loosen its grip on the local utilities. Water is being privatized in many countries, and not for the good of the people.
I think the OP is assuming way too much. I’m guessing that a substantial number of the 1 billion haven’t even heard of the germ theory of disease – sort of prerequisite to the idea of water purification and sanitation. So if you’re stuck in the medieval “let’s empty the chamber pot in the street” level of sanitation, you can pretty much give up on the idea of clean water.
There are also a number of very hardy organisms that resist chlorine and boiling – giardia is one example.
So put it down to lack of education, infrastructure, funding, and an excess of grinding poverty.
Color me confused, but what are they making these teas/coffees/beers with, magical fairy water? Yes, tea and coffee are normally prepared by boiling water, but if they’re doing that anyway, why not just drink the result, rather than add another step?
Cholera and dysentery are, IIRC, the usually result of fecal matter contaminating drinkng water. The problem may be one of lack of sanitary services than with the water itself.
Yeah color me that way too. If I can do a small hijack: does the process of brewing beer somehow remove impurities from the water used? We always hear about people in the middle ages (or whatever) drinking beer because the water wasn’t safe to drink. What did they use to make the beer with?
Likely the answer to the op is the same as why a billion or so people don’t have access to steady food sources. It’s because many of them live in corrupt kleptocracies where any money that might normally be spent on improving infrastructure is instead used on lavish purchases of cars or palaces or ferreted away into Swiss bank accounts, or spent on weapons to fight pointless civil wars.
Man, I’m actually cheering for the return of colonialism in some places.
You are busted! You didn’t even click the link. It’s a cylindrical-shaped water jug that one puts a rope through to make it easier to haul. A little kid can pull something like fifty pounds worth of water where they currently have to haul water in buckets and unwieldy containers. It sure as hell ain’t an “improved drinking supply,” but it looks to be a significant improvement in the meantime. If we can get them distributed, that is.
'Cause in the places and times where all this started, they didn’t have the germ theory of disease or any concept of the scientific method.
Joes drinks a lot of beer. Joe doesn’t get sick as often as others. Others notice, and assume beer has some magical property that protects you from disease. Now everyone drinks beer instead of water. People don’t get sick as often, and they have more fun. Let’s keep drinking beer.
Same with tea or whatever local drink is made by boiling stuff. The drink itself my or may not have any effect. Boiling the water to make the drink does the “magic” but you’ll be hard pressed to make the folk stop drinking their magical beverage.
QED: The reason they make teas, etc… is because microbially pure water doesn’t necessarily taste good at all. When I was in Boy Scouts, I recall drinking some decidedly funky water that the iodine tablets didn’t really make any worse. But… if you mix it with Kool-Aid or something like that, it improves dramatically. I suspect that making some kind of tea would be pretty similar.
I Love Me: Actually, there is something special about beer brewing. First off, in standard Western beer brewing, you boil the beer/grain sugar mixture (wort) before fermentation. This kills any nasties present in the water or grain. Second, assuming that the yeast is present in sufficient quantities, it’ll generally out-compete the other microorganisms, and between the alcohol and raised acidity in the finished brew, it’ll be relatively resistant to infection by most other microorganisms. Acetic acid and lactic acid bacteria are the big two that tend to be exceptions to the rule. Acetic acid bacteria produce vinegar, and lactic acid bacteria make beer taste sour. (think lambics, if you’ve had one before).
That being said, I think ** Bryan Ekers ** probably has the most likely answer. I mean, if it was a matter of providing people with household bleach, it would likely cost FAR less than 1 cent/ oz due to economies of scale and govt. subsidies. Same goes for food- I think that much of the aid provided by the West is squandered or inefficiently distributed or deliberately withheld due to asinine tribal squabbles.
People usually try to source the best water they can get for these drinks; they don’t brew beer out of muddy river water during flood time. But still they do use regular old water which can have nasties in it. In either tea or beer, the water is boiled first. Brewing would add some alcohol to the water as well.
The people of long ago didn’t actually know that they were disinfecting the water in the process of making these drinks, they just noticed they didn’t get sick so often when they drank them instead of puddle water. That’s why the extra steps were involved; nobody realized they were extra. How long have we known about water-born disease and disinfection… and how long have tea and beer been around? Chalk this safer form of water from long ago up to coincidence rather than ancient wisdom.
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Dammit, this has already been said. Oh well, I wasted 5 minutes of work time so I’ll post it anyways!