``Water and Life``

A HOSTEL that housed many students, including a good friend of mine from Iran, was situated half-way between the John Gutenberg University and the Teaching Hospital of the same institution.

Both institutions were on hill-tops, and a pass in-between them had been converted in later days into a boulevard for motorcars, trams, cyclists, and pedestrians. This very wide multi-usage street bored at one point through hard rocks, on top of which ran an ancient Roman wall that merged seamlessly into an abandoned aqueduct.

The arrangement was the continuation of an ancient system that drew fresh water from the Rhine River to relatively less-endowed part of Germany, the city of Trier in the Rhineland Palatinate, where Karl Marx, propagator of Communism, (Marxism), was born in 1818. My Persian friend, a student of oriental studies, invited me one evening to a popular students'pub, situated not far from the ruins of the aqueduct, just mentioned above. We met that evening lots of tourists, most of whom were Americans. A specialty of the restaurant was roasted pheasant, which was served with botched potatoes, made the hunters' way. My friend told me quite a lot about the Romans, who reigned from Europe all the way to Afghanistan, (from 27 BC, till 476 AD), and their ability to conduct water to places that they ventured into was phenomenal.

In Ancient Egypt, the cities, Cairo, (the Capital of Egypt, population 8 million) and the Nile-Delta, where Alexandria once housed the world's largest library, depended a lot on water. From Mainz in Germany, through Egypt and Afghanistan, remnants of the Roman Aqueducts system to carry water for sustaining life, and for construction work, still stay impressive. The world's greatest congregation of people is always around substantive rivers in the form of cities, examples of which are, Frankfurt on the River Main, Cairo on the Nile, London on the Thames, Newcastle on Tyne, etc. Life is of aquatic origin, scientifically looked at. The cell, without its water component, is just around ten percent of its gross weight. Life activities, (metabolism, and catabolism), both take place like in symbiosis, in milieu of water as a substance, and with its components, (Hydrogen, and Oxygen, as atoms and molecules). For humans, life cannot be sustained without external (additional) supply of water for more than one week, the very longest.

Water for transportation, (Oceans, Lakes, and rivers) has contributed immensely to the building up of technological development, (civilisation), since five thousand years, or more. The opening up of what has become the New World, discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492, propelled the world into a new mode of mass movement of peoples, with its attendant opportunities, but also exploitation of man by man, (the slave-trade). The Phoenician civilisation along the Nile basin, and the usage agriculturally of the Nile, must have made possible. Further utilisation of the water-way, to haul down the Nile the unimaginable chunks of rock which were used in constructing the Pyramids, which must have indirectly, (or perhaps directly), led to the advancements of medical breakthroughs, first mummification, and then surgery of the HYPOPHYSIS, through the nasal passage, a procedure to ablate neoplasms of the hypophysis, still in use till today.

Let us divert our attention at this stage to the medical profession, and act and think as though we were all doctors of medicine. We have all heard, even before we became doctors, the “dictum” which goes like this: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” We do not have the time, or the space, to go into the finest details of what it means. But, even if we did, we could not count on the patience of our noble readers, to go along “ad infinitum.” That being the case, let us opt for simplicity. What the entire ancient dictum tries to establish is that, “we stay clean, and we should be healthy, the way god created us.”

In the Garden of Eden there was no disease. Everything was clean, pure and pristine. We acquired the filth and the attendant diseases much later. Some Mummies, among the Ancient Pharaohs, show evidence of such diseases as “Tuberculosis” and “chicken pox.” Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Monarch and Conqueror, (356- 323 BC), must have died of Cholera, (a gastro-intestinal infection), at home, where hygiene was deficient, (even at circles as high as that).

Clean water must have been scarce then. Waterways, (mostly Seaways), were the easiest (best) modes of traveling, or transportation, for millennia. The gargantuan pieces of rock, hewn in the upper Nile region, (Lower Egypt), and transported on ships made out of Cedar wood, (Steel of those days), are the easiest examples to fall on. Civilisation in-between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, in what corresponds to present day Iraq, preceded the developments in Egypt where, farming, tapping on the ever-presence of Nile waters.

This was in tandem with construction work on the Pyramids, (e.g. the Great Pyramids in Giza). Industrialization in Europe did run on the “rails” of water in Rivers, and Steam in Steam Engines, or both, which powered the ships, (then called correctly “steamers”). Discovery of America in 1492 took all this into greater dimensions, whereby the big steamers crossed the Atlantic from Europe to America, and after arrival in America, the railway took away business from the cowboy and his horse. Institutions which became known as hospitals, needed water to stay clean, and water could be supplied.

Back in Europe, Philip Semmelweis, (1818-1865), had observed what mankind could do to prevent death surrounding childbirth, (puerperal sepsis). “Use water and soap to give your hands a thorough washing before attending to women in labour”. Joseph Lister, (1927-1919), made a name with the application of 5% solution of carbonic acid to disinfect surgical wounds. [A solution, which contained a high percentage of water]. Water is necessary to attain a high percentage of cleanliness in homes and hospitals, or institutions bringing together huge masses of people. Water and its availability at affordable prices shows a tendency of running a linear with a declining trend. Water, in other words, is getting scarcer. The scene of school children with yellow plastic buckets and pails crouching in and near gutters in the early hours of the day, in search, and with the hope, of getting water to go home with, dampens the spirit of any citizen, and I guess non-citizens living with us morning after morning.

Your destiny of coming by water, because you are connected to the national supply, is dashed, as you wake up in the middle of the night to use the faucet, but discover at the end you won't be able to flush. Imagine the stench in your home, as five toilets in your home have contributed to give you exactly what you don't need. So, the answer seems a borehole for every household! There is no standardisation of the water obtained individually. When tests may be conducted at whoever's request, the results are as reliable as the way you want them. Data obtained from “hospitals” are as reliable as you meet erstwhile patients carry their folders into their remote villages.

When they die, only the Almighty may know of what. When you attend funerals of relatively young people who died in hospitals, ask what they died of. If there should be an answer, it should be “Typhoid perforation.” With no answer, your bet is the same, Typhoid. No water to clean anything!!

Source: Dr. Kofi Dankyi Beeko. MD.- Ghanaian Chronicle