Polluted Water Leaves Rural Mexican Community 'Living in Hell' Thomson Reuters Foundation
go to original April 28, 2016

Antonio Aguilar, 5, was born blind after his mother spent her pregnancy living close to the water of Mexico’s Lake Endho, in Tula, Hidalgo state, where raw sewage is brought by pipelines from Mexico City, some 70 miles away. (Vincent Long)

Mexico City's sewers handle more than 34,000 liters of sewage per second from its nine million residents, all of which is sent north via two pipelines into the rivers of Hidalgo.

The sewage resurfaces in the Tula Valley, where 70 percent of the water was classified as "highly contaminated" in a 2012 Inter-American Development Bank study.

The air around the 85,000-hectare reservoir, where the River Salto widens and slows, is thick with the stench of sulfur and raw sewage.

Houses are coated in a light-brown dust from the water's murky surface and mosquitoes, their numbers boosted by the fetid atmosphere, keep residents indoors after sunset.

"We're living in hell," said Juana Guerrero, a school teacher in waterside Xijay who said students regularly have red eyes and weeping tear glands symptomatic of conjunctivitis.

"We get conjunctivitis, headaches, stomach cramps, diarrhea, skin problems, kidney failure, dengue fever," she said. "The Red Cross only just managed to control a bout of cholera we had last year."

Mayra Paredes, a consultant at Tula General Hospital, said there had been a large increase in the past decade of birth defects in infants whose mothers stay beside Lake Endho during pregnancy.

Read the whole article at Thomson Reuters Foundation

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