Science Guardian

The vital importance of water in life and death

How drinking revitalizes old people

Albatrosses and lions are dying, but cleaning the air may sink the planet faster

The death of Christine Maggiore not from HIV but at least partly from dehydration and associated causes draws attention to the part played by water in human survival. On an individual level, dehydration can weaken and kill rapidly, much faster that starvation. Humans - 68 per cent water - may not survive a loss of even 10% of bodily fluid. Even a 2% deficit causes severe fatigue, dizziness and fainting.

Research by ‘American College of Sports Medicine’ shows that more than 300 people die of heat related illnesses every year. The study also confirmed that children are more susceptible to dehydration and heat illness than adults and once the children are dehydrated its almost impossible for them to regain their health

Dehydration exacts a deadly toll on Mexican immigrants crossing the US border on foot in the desert:

Today, because of increased enforcement elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s the busiest corridor for illegal immigration. It’s also the deadliest.

The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson last year received 205 bodies of unidentified migrants. The number is at an all-time high, 10 times the annual rate back in the 1990s.

“Something has funneled people into the Sonoran Desert,” says Dr. Bruce Anderson, the office’s forensic anthropologist, who oversees the autopsies.

“They used to cross in Texas or California or New Mexico, in safer places. The Sonoran Desert is not a safe place to cross any time of year. In the summertime, it’s lethal.”

One of the concerns raised by the Israeli pounding of Gaza going on as we write is the nightmarish prospect of as many as 500,000 people running out of water completely. If they do, they will have no more than roughly four days to live.

Elixir of vitality

Many people would be healthier if they drank more fluids, it seems clear. This especially applies to oldsters, who tend to lose their sense of thirst as they grow older. Death is often preceded by refusal to drink.

The BBC News drew attention to the vital role of water in human health in June with its story about an effort to get seniors in a “care home” in Bury St. Edmonds, England to take more of the magic elixir which had dramatic efforts on their health and well being:

How care home keeps elderly healthy,
Monday, 23 June 2008 02:07 UK
BBC News
By Jane Hughes
Health correspondent

A year ago, 88-year-old Jean Lavender used to find walking any distance a struggle.

Now she is keen to get outside for a walk most days.

And she puts the transformation down to the most simple of medicines - water.

She is one of a group of residents at a care home in Suffolk who have been encouraged to increase their intake of water.

And they have all reported dramatic results.

Jean says she feels 20 years younger.

“I feel more alert - more cheerful too. I’m not a miserable person, but it’s added a sort of zest.”

Staff at The Martins care home in Bury St Edmunds started a “water club” for their residents last summer.

Residents were encouraged to drink eight to 10 glasses of water a day, water coolers were installed, and they were each given a jug for their room.

The views of some residents after drinking more water

They report significant improvements in health as a result - many fewer falls, fewer GP call-outs, a cut in the use of laxatives and in urinary infections, better quality of sleep, and lower rates of agitation among residents with dementia.

Dehydration

Doctors have long highlighted the risks of dehydration for elderly people. It can cause dizziness and potentially serious falls, constipation, and confusion.

The whole home buzzes now; there isn’t that period after lunch when everyone goes off to sleep.

While most people’s systems can adjust to insufficient water, frail old people are far less equipped to cope.

So when Wendy Tomlinson, a former nurse, took over the management of the charity-run home, she suspected that drinking more water might help the residents feel better.

Even she has been surprised by how much difference it’s made, though.

“It’s been fantastic,” she said. “The whole home buzzes now; there isn’t that period after lunch when everyone goes off to sleep.”

For Baroness Greengross, a cross-bench peer, it reinforces a conviction she has had for some time now - that many old people simply are not drinking enough, and it is harming their health.

She wants to see tougher regulations in care homes across the UK, so that staff have to make sure residents drink enough.

“We hear a great deal about malnutrition among old people,” she says.

“But we forget about the need for them to have enough water. It shouldn’t be very difficult to change the habits of care staff.”

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7466457.stm

Published: 2008/06/23 01:07:08 GMT

The world as toilet

Meanwhile, water is a problem on several planetary levels, due to pollution. The global shortage of water threatens to become catastrophic, and the seas are plagued with permanent plastic pollution which in the center of the Atlantic now is more plentiful than plankton.

Something is amiss in our global world water supply: Striped bass are succumbing to flesh-eating bacteria in Chesapeake Bay; seabird chicks are starving in Hawai‘i; coral reefs are weakening under a growing assault of invisible contaminants and an increasing variety of aquatic animals are showing signs of developmental disorders. Experts and citizens are racing to find clues to the causes—and the solutions. Find out how we all can make a difference.

That’s the teaser for our latest PBS viewing, the dramatically presented Dirty Secrets, a National Geographic special, according to which the seas off Africa are so short of fish that the natives of Ghana have eaten most of the wild life as “bushmeat” and lions and elephants have been replaced with baboons so aggressive they raid the chickens of villagers at night.

Then there is the rise in the sea level which global warming threatens. According to scientists such as Jim Hansen in tonight’s Nova episode of planetary doomsaying on Channel 13, Dimming Sun, our polluting the atmosphere (which now kills a million Indians a year) has actually slowed global warming up till now by sheltering the earth with extra, polluted cloud cover. If we succeed in cleaning up the atmosphere, the rise in sea level may be far greater than we ever imagined - nine feet or even higher, or “several meters per century” (Hansen).

LA Times gives no cause of death, but HIV propagandists can’t wait

Bad luck for AIDS reformers, to add to other setbacks, though Christine’s heroism may yet prove out

Who’s bigger, Anthony Fauci or Bernie Madoff?

Perhaps the best known public activist against the HIV-causes-AIDS premise in science and medicine, Christine Maggiore has unexpectedly died at 52, the Los Angeles Times reports in a blog today (Dec 30 Tuesday).

Christine Maggiore, vocal skeptic of AIDS research, dies at 52:

Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.

On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast-fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.

On Saturday, Maggiore died at her Van Nuys home, leaving a husband, a son and many unanswered questions. She was 52.

According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months. Because she had recently been under a doctor’s care, no autopsy will be performed unless requested by the family, they said. Her husband, Robin Scovill, could not be reached for comment.

No cause of death was stated other than lingering pneumonia, but the world’s poster girl for replacing the HIV/AIDS paradigm - beautiful, intelligent, courageous, determined and persuasive in her personal and public rejection and condemnation of the official rationale for treating AIDS as if it were caused by HIV - looks likely now to become the poster girl for the witless defenders of the HIV faith, who are already trumpeting her death as the inevitable consequence of denying their belief.

But in fact, the report of the LA Times gives them no real grounds for saying so, and nor does her life. All the facts in the news report which suggest that Maggiore died because she flouted known science and disregarded established medicine are errors. Maggiore did test positive on an HIV test many years ago, but then negative often enough for her status in this regard to be uncertain at the very least, and in fact probably negative during the many years she wisely refused any further testing. Her child, Eliza Jane, did not die of AIDS-related pneumonia, but of allergic reaction to amoxicillin. This is perfectly clear to all who are not under the superstition that all illness is caused by HIV as soon as anyone mentions AIDS as a possibility. The child died very rapidly after being medicated by a standard antibiotic which occasionally causes fatal systemic overreaction. She did not decline over months from AIDS related symptoms of any kind.

Maggiore’s friends said she underwent a holistic “cleanse” last month that left her feeling ill.

“She was telling me that she wasn’t feeling great,” Carter said, adding that he questioned whether the pneumonia was related to AIDS.

As an advocate, Maggiore counseled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure to use the drug AZT as a method to reduce the chances of transmission to their babies. She considered the drug toxic.

Maggoire gave birth to her son, Charlie, and his younger sister, Eliza Jane, at home and breast-fed both, although research indicates that it increases the risk of transmission. Eliza Jane Scovill died in 2005 from what the coroner ruled was AIDS-related pneumonia. Maggiore and Scovill, however, hired a pathologist who concluded that the girl died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin.

After Eliza Jane’s death, Los Angeles police investigated whether Maggiore and Scovill were negligent in not testing the girl for HIV. In 2006, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office decided not to file criminal charges against Maggiore, saying that it would have been difficult to prove criminal negligence because Maggiore had sought medical advice. Friends said that Maggiore never fully recovered after the death of her daughter and that she had trouble even sleeping and eating. Her preteen son, Charlie, has tested HIV negative.

Last year, Maggiore and Scovill sued Los Angeles County and others on behalf of their daughter’s estate, charging that the autopsy report lacked proper medical and scientific evidence for the declared cause of deat