Water crisis looms

By Sheree Béga

South Africa's water quality is fast deteriorating but the shrinking scientific and engineering capacity to counter this is emerging as the real crisis to strike the country.

This is according to Dr Anthony Turton, a senior water researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who maintains that up to 50 percent of municipalities "do not have even one qualified engineer" on their staff.

Turton cites scientific research to counter the toxic cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, which is found in most of SA's river and reservoir systems, according to a recent CSIR study, and can cause diarrhea and vomiting.

"The original work for that was done in the 1980s in massive programmes based at the CSIR," says Turton. "Those programmes generated many PhD graduates, but also did the primary science on which future management will be based.

"Those programmes are no longer in existence, and this is a national crisis of note. We need to recover the bits and pieces we can and then develop new national capacity," says Turton.

He says cyanobacteria produce microcystin, a group of toxins with different chemical properties and medical manifestations. "The worst case in Finland is 10 micrograms per litre; the worst case in the US is 60 micrograms per litre; the current SA level is 10 000 micrograms per litre, with some spiking to 15 000.

"Nowhere else in the world is this happening. We as a nation will be required to solve this problem as a nation. This is where national science councils come in. They are national assets, but the current funding models are so restrictive that their potential is being reduced and the capacity they have is being privatised."

A CSIR study released earlier this year, entitled State of the Nation Report, found cyanobacterial blooms recorded in many "if not most" of SA's river and reservoir systems - where most of our drinking water is obtained - because of "prevailing high levels of eutrophication caused by inadequate treatment of domestic and industrial effluents" discharged in their catchments.

While cyanobacterial poisoning is widespread among livestock, domestic animals and wildlife, there are no known human fatalities, says the report. "The deemed health risk to humans is via long-term chronic exposure to low levels of cyanotoxins in water used for drinking and domestic uses, because it's estimated that only 21 percent of households have access to piped water inside their homes."

The Star, 20 September 2008