Review of Ted Talks

I watched Fahad Al-Attyia: A country with no water. It made me want to watch it because of the title because I automatically thought how could a country survive without water? It is populated with over 300,000 thousand people and there is not enough clean water to fill all those people needs. Although, we are a wet planet we don’t even have enough fresh nor clean water. These countries have suffered several years of drought leaving villages with barely enough water to help with thirst. Also, because of some horrible environmental factors that the world has faced causes low water supply as well. With the destruction of rain forests and overfishing of the sea a shortage of fresh water is at the top of the list. It is an estimated 1.2  billion people drink unclean water and 2.5 billion lack proper pluming. The federal government's latest report on water reservoirs and tap water indicates that seriously contaminated water supplies are intensively and successfully cleaned by the time they reach apartment buildings and consumers. Interviews with environmental experts, however, suggest that decrepit pipes in those buildings and excessively dirty reservoirs make the drinking water situations terrible. Rufina Mikhailova, a top laboratory scientist at Moscow's Sysin Institute for Human Ecology and Environmental Safety, has said Russian tap water should be boiled before drinking to eliminate problems related to the chlorination used by many water treatment plants here. Yet Moscow's water rates well overall, she said. "In Moscow, tap water meets the Russian Federation's modern hygiene standards and the World Health Organization's recommendations for almost every indicator — microbial, parasite, radiological and chemical," Mikhailova told Gastronom.ru in November. The federal report doesn't say what chemical or biological contaminants were in the affected samples. Researchers with environmental groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow contacted for this article also didn't know about the contaminants in detail, and the Sysin Institute's Mikhailova wasn't available for an interview. Yet, based on Mikhailova's previous interviews and other articles in the Russian press, problem substances can include excess chlorine from the process of cleaning water supplies through chlorination, Giardia and other microbes that wreak havoc in the intestines, and excessive iron. From high levels of microorganisms to excessive chemical contamination to just poor taste, the tap water in the two cities is an ongoing public health issue. Both environmental experts and the Federal Consumer Protection Service suggest that a major part of the problem is literally at the source of the water itself. In the service's last annual report on public health, published in July 2011 and analyzing 2010 conditions, there is a worrisome picture of water sources for Moscow and St. Petersburg drinking water.

445