by Mark Waller

The recent outbreaks of cholera in South Africa are highlighting deeper and more persistent problems with the country's overstretched water resources. These feature the legacies of South Africa's turbulent past and present - a century of largely unregulated and rapacious gold mining and the current HIV pandemic.

Last Novembe,r the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) took the unusual step of preventing one of its top researchers, Dr Anthony Turton, from presenting a keynote address at a conference held in Pretoria.

The presentation describes an impending crisis affecting the country's water, in which reserves of surplus water have all but run out. About 98% of water is already allocated. This means that South Africa has lost its dilution capacity in water treatment, so that pollutants are being recycled in the water system without being removed.

According to Turton, there is an increasing amount of partially metabolized medication in the water supply. The high HIV/AIDS rate and intense treatment programme is resulting in appreciable anti-retroviral levels in rivers. "These complex chemical compounds will be entering the human population over time, either through drinking water of produce irrigated with contaminated water. We need to develop the science to understand this better. This is clearly a national priority."

Turton says that South African rivers around old gold mining areas have already heavy metal and radionuclide contamination from over 100 years of unregulated mining. Large sections of Soweto and east and west Gauteng province are located on land contaminated by the gold mining industry.

Though most South African households in urban areas receive treated water, the spread of many slum settlements built of shacks that have no water supply means that some communities still get their water untreated from rivers and dams. People from these communities are being more directly exposed to contaminants.

One of Turton's observations in his analysis is that South Africa's history of human rights abuse has influenced the low priority of providing safe water to poor densely populated areas. The gathering problems of providing safe water threaten to cause social instability.

The CSIR says that Turton's keynote presentation was cancelled because it contains "unsubstantiated claims". The presentation had nevertheless passed a routine peer-review process.

Environmental NGOs and other sections of civil society have come out strongly in support of Turton. They say that his description of a gathering crisis is accurate and that the government-funded CSIR is ducking the issue because the implications of reforming water sustainability and quality would mean fundamental policy changes and very different public spending priorities.

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