India’s Ganges River: Inadvertently Cleansing One’s Soul with Raw Sewage

Bathing in the Ganges River

In India it is generally believed by Hindus that one should bathe at least once in his lifetime in the Ganges River in order to cleanse one’s soul. Indeed, many Indians make an annual pilgrimage to the Ganges for such purposes.

Unfortunately the Ganges, while it may cleanse your soul, is likely to do less for your health. It is indescribably polluted.

As one writer noted:

“But the pollution that bedevils the river could do untold damage to the bodies of the faithful who will bathe in the Indian city of Allahabad over the next few weeks.

Ram Surat Das, a barefoot old man, emerged from a crowd of Ganges bathers on Saturday holding a steel pot of water.

“I’ll use this for drinking and cooking and get some more tonight,” he said. “It’s absolutely clean. Of course it is, it’s Ganges water.”

So far he has survived the physical onslaught of raw sewage, rotting carcasses, industrial effluent, fertilizers and pesticides that infect the river from the Himalayan foothills to the Bay of Bengal.

Experts say pollution is to blame for a host of diseases – hepatitis, amoebic dysentery, typhoid, cholera and cancer – among the roughly 400 million people who live in the vast Gangetic basin.”

But the Indians may have come upon a unique solution. After a dip in the Ganges, why not a followup in the Iska Vagu? This river may do for the body what the Ganges did for the soul. Because…

World’s highest drug levels entering India stream

“PATANCHERU, India – When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.”

Now we’re talking.

“If you take a bath there, then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment,” said chemist Klaus Kuemmerer at the University of Freiburg Medical Center in Germany, an expert on drug resistance in the environment who did not participate in the research. “If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you’re treated for everything. The question is for how long?”

“At first, Joakim Larsson, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, questioned whether 100 pounds a day of ciprofloxacin could really be running into the stream. The researcher was so baffled by the unprecedented results he sent the samples to a second lab for independent analysis.”

Iska Vagu

Of course with every blessing there is a small price:

“”Not only is there the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolving; the entire biological food web could be affected,” said Stan Cox, senior scientist at the Land Institute, a nonprofit agriculture research center in Salina, Kan. Cox has studied and written about pharmaceutical pollution in Patancheru. “If Cipro is so widespread, it is likely that other drugs are out in the environment and getting into people’s bodies.”

By the way, ciprofloxacin is the most effective treatment for anthrax, of the three antibiotics currently approved for the disease. And anthrax is endemic to the region.

by pat

Image – Ganges River Bathing
Image - River Testing
Source – Planet Ark
Source – Yahoo.com

Tags: Ganges, Hindu, india, pollution