The Effects of Water Pollution

Water is a crucial element on Earth as most of the mother Earth’s surface is roofed by water and human beings use water conscious and unconsciously every day. As the population of human on Earth is increasing over time, more and more people had put heavy pressure on the water resources and causes water pollution. For example, factory waste leaked and contaminated the underground water supply, due to poor control system. Water pollution can be characterized as clean water is polluted by chemical or other substances that is harmful to living things.

In this essay, focuses on three negative effects of water pollution which are on human health, economic growth, and aquatic life.

The water pollution brings negative impact on human health. A number of consequences maybe viewed instantly, whilst some will show up after several months or years. In fact, contaminated water are the main reason for fatality. Polluted water will contain various types of diseases such as typhoid fever or cholera.

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This type of water pollution that affect human health is known as microbial water pollution. Apart from that, the effect of water pollution on health problems also includes poor blood circulation, skin lesions, vomiting and destroy human nervous system (Rafia & Ataur, 2017). The diseases are disseminate directly among humans through microorganisms named pathogens. Polluted water destroys the crop production and taint the food. 10% of population relies on food and vegetables that are grown in contaminated water. By consuming those food, people tend to get sick easily. Water pollution will also affect human health by causing destructive consequences on gravid women who expose to chemicals and resulting in giving birth to new born who has low birth weight.

A metal contaminated water also causes hair loss, liver cirrhosis, renal failure and neural disorder (Mahtab et al., 2017).

Moreover, water pollution will also bring a negative impact towards the economic growth. The reporters had discovered that the world is facing an invisible crisis of water quality as polluted water is limiting one-third of the economic growth and this will also cause a decline in GDP growth because of the impact on health, agriculture and also the ecosystem (India Today, 2019). For example, the crisis of Fukushima disaster has caused more than 1 million tons of radiation-contaminated water in storage tanks at the site now and the storage tank will soon runned out by year end of 2020 (The Asahi Shimbun, 2019). Apart from that, the government of Japan has also estimated a total cost of 148 billion to decontaminate the affected area which is around 20% of their country’s annual budget. As a result, this has proof that water pollution would hurt the economy because it is costly to clean and avoid contamination (Kiyoshi, 2019).

In addition, water pollution also affects aquatic life by killing them through polluted water that contain toxin and it will cause disruption of food chain. Many types of water pollution cause damage to the marine life. Fish and aquatic mammals are the peak of the aquatic food chain that are unprotected from high levels of toxic directly from the polluted water and by eating other aquatic animals that are also exposed greatly by the toxic in the polluted water (Ganguly, 2013). Macroinvertebrates and macrophytes are also unluckily impacted by biodegradable organic pollution. This cause light levels to drop and high amount of suspend and settling material causing the reduction or loss of species that were infected by the pollution, while species that are liberal will grow in large amount of number (Plenty & Aldous, 2018).

In conclusion, water pollution brings plenty of negative effects on human health, economic growth, and aquatic life. Hence, water pollution do really affect the environment and eventually threaten the life of human beings and animals. As the most important resource to the survival of mankind is water, human should really be alert with this environmental problem and work together as a team to restore a mother nature that was once beautiful.