When the best medicine is water!

One of my favorite magazines is Ode, an international magazine that tells about progress, ongoing opportunities and the creativity of humankind. In the October, 2006 issue is an interesting article written by Tijn Touber about the work of Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, author of Your Bodies Many Cries for Water.

In 1979 Batmanghelidj was imprisoned in Tehran by the ayatollahs. One night he was trying to help a fellow prisoner find relief from the suffering caused by server stomach ulcers. Since no medicine was available, Batmanghelidj gave the man two glasses of water. Within 10 minutes the man’s ulcer pain was greatly relieved.

After his release from prison, Batmanghelidj immigrated to the United States and began to research and write articles and books based on his belief that water plays a huge role in our bodies’ health. He explains that water regulates all body functions. If the body becomes dehydrated it begins a water-rationing process. The brain is first in line to receive the water that is available, followed by the kidneys and liver.

Peter Ragnar, the American author of 17 books on health and longevity, writes that he not only supports the concept of “medicine water” but also believes that Alzheimer’s disease could be the result of long-term dehydration of the brain. According to Ragnar, at least eighty percent of the brain is water and reducing the amount of water available to our brains by just two percent makes our short-term memory so muddled that we can’t remember the names of friends or where we left our keys.

Having read all of that information I can assure you that I am taking the message to heart...and thanking God with gratitude for our easy access to water. I know that it takes enormous amounts of water to produce food, even in rich agricultural areas. In many parts of the world water is either physically scarce or economically scarce. The New York Times reports that arid cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix already grapple with sporadic water shortages. New York City's water is getting cloudy, and the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the pipes and other parts of the country's creaky water system a D minus. Hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans lack access to safe drinking water. Many of them become ill or die each year from water-related health risks.

The World Hunger Year reports that scaracity of water is especially hard on women and girls. “Because of traditional gender roles, in many places in rural Africa and Asia, the task of gathering water for the family is considered women's work. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), women and female children spend more than 10 million "person-years" carrying water from remote sources each year. With growing water scarcity, women and girls must travel longer distances to obtain water, a chore that often occupies several hours of the day. In some cases, women must leave at dawn traveling miles to the nearest well--returning under the weight of full water containers--in order to bring water home by as late as midnight. In other cases, a woman might have to spend an entire night waiting at distant water pumps among scores of other women for a turn to fill a water container.

Many implications stem from these long distances that women and girls must travel in order to gather water. Busy with this task, women are prevented from participating in more socially valued, income-generating areas of the local economy, such as selling products or gardening. Because women's contributions are considered to be informal--or in other words relating more to the home than to export agriculture or commerce--their labors often go unrecognized.

What's more, the cycle of excluding women from income-generating activities continues as school-age girls spend hours each day carrying water for their families instead of pursuing an education. According to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, of the 120 million school-age children not in school, the majority are girls. 'This lack of education early in life often consigns girls to poverty or dependence later in life,' said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy."

Water is fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a healthy life in human dignity. It is a pre-requisite to the realization of all other human rights.

-The United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights, Environment News Service.