Water Borne Diseases

 

Supply of fresh and clean drinking water is a basic need for all human beings on the earth, yet it has been observed that millions of people worldwide are deprived of this. Industrial growth, urbanization and the increasing use of synthetic organic substances have serious and adverse impacts on freshwater bodies. 

The term "waterborne disease" is reserved largely for infections that predominantly are transmitted through contact with or consumption of infected water.  Drinking of water contaminated by human or animal feces, which contains pathogenic microorganisms, causes water borne diseases. Many infections might be transmitted by microbes or parasites that accidentally, possibly as a result of exceptional circumstances, had got into water, but the fact that there might be an occasional freak infection does not mean that it is useful to categorise the resulting disease as "waterborne". In developing countries four-fifths of all the illness are caused by water-borne diseases, with diarrhea being the leading cause of childhood death.

Today, 37.7 million Indians are affected by waterborne diseases annually, 1.5 million children are estimated to die of diarrhoea alone. 

Maximum of Water-borne diseases and water-caused health problems are mostly due to the incompetent management of water resources. In most of the urban areas water gets contaminated in many different ways, some of the most common reasons being leaky water pipe joints in areas where the water pipe and most of the sewage line pass close together. Sometimes the water gets polluted at source due to various reasons and mainly due to inflow of sewage into the source. 

 

Water Pollution causes the water borne disease

Bacterial infections Typhoid
Cholera
Paratyphoid fever
Bacillary dysentery
Viral infections Infectious Hepatitis (jaundice)
Poliomyelitis

Symptoms

 

Water borne diseases symptoms depend upon the Infecting Agent.

Symptoms may begin from two to ten days after drinking the contaminated water, and may include diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and low-grade fever.

Patients with bacterial dysentery often have fever, abdominal cramps, rectal pain, and bloody stools. Occasionally, large portions of the intestinal membrane pass with particularly foul-smelling stool containing yellowish white mucus and/or blood.

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