I am not anything close to an ecologist or a biologist so this question may be really dumb. But I know that water is essential. It is used in many important bodily processes and we would die without it very quickly.
So my question is, how did so many generations of humans survive without the water purification standards that we have today?
Is there a reasonable amount of dirt, toxins, bacteria, etc… that can be in water and it won’t make us sick?
I also know people have boiled water for a very long time but didn’t we only discover bacteria and viruses in the lasts several hundred years? Did people know that boiling water would purify it?
Also am I wrong for thinking that most water in nature is dangerous to drink?
Hopefully these questions make sense.
In: 1437
In addition to the other comments explaining specific waterborne threats, I will add that diseases and their host are, by necessity, in equilibrium.
If a disease (in this case, waterborne) becomes too lethal it will wipe out a population or force that population to adapt which will eliminate its ability to spread. Evolution pushes disease to be effective enough to spread but not too effective that they are wiped out.
When you are talking specifically about waterborne threats, they are almost always caused by human waste entering waterways (a result of the parasitic cycle of growing in a human host and then getting dumped back into the water supply). Humans very long ago evolved to know not to contaminate waterways by defecating away from their water source. As humans have taken over the world, however, overcrowding has become a huge issue in many areas which has led to it being impossible to gather and dispose of human waste effectively so it has naturally overflowed back into water sources. In this way, waterborne diseases are actually a check against overpopulation and another example where diseases and humans achieve a state of equilibrium.
Latest Answers