Health care without drinking water?

Dozens of municipalities have been affected, some for years, Lack of drinking water. Many of them are touristic, and these days they greet their visitors with what is already familiar to their inhabitants: the obligation to buy bottled water to cook and even brush their teeth.

But right now, with over 600 Andalusian and Catalan municipalities suffering from drought restrictions (the national dam water supply is 42%), it must be recognized that this lucky something comes out of the fauceteven if you can’t drink. And we better get used to it, because, according to Greenpeace, sooner or later Spain will experience droughts ten times worse than the current ones.

Thus, water is a double problem in Spain.: This is its rarity as well as its quality and safety for human consumption. A recent study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) published in Environmental health perspectives concludes that nitrates and trihalomethanes (THMs) present in tap water as well as bottled water add to other long-term risk factors for prostate cancer. According to this journal, this is the first work that links these compounds to this type of tumor in the world medical literature, where there was already evidence of its association with colorectal cancer. It should be remembered that nitrates (associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, leukemia and other cancers) present in water come from fertilizers and slurry from intensive farming and animal husbandry; rain washes them into aquifers and rivers.

In other words, the scarcity of water and its poor quality for human consumption in many parts of Spain, unless multifactorial measures are taken and urgently effective, they threaten the public health, habitability, activity and economy of large areas of the national geography.

Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente (Poza de la Sal, Burgos, 1928 – Alaska, 1980), famous naturalist and ecologist (director of the legendary TVE series Man and earthwhich was broadcast on chains to five continents) and a trained dentist, he already told us: “Man will end when the life balance of the planet that supports him ends.”