Upon privatisation in 1989, government granted the new water companies enormous free assets in the form of land and reservoirs. It did so, on certain conditions. The main one was that they would continually invest in increasing the size and efficiency of sewage treatment works, in line with population growth. All of them failed to do this.
Instead, they treated the business as an unending ‘cash, loan and bonus cow’. This remains the case even as, over time, major foreign investors from Canada, China, Australia and the Far East have become, in many cases, the controlling owners.
The result has been that the companies, and our health conditions, are now under foreign control.
The companies have installed virtually no increase in wet weather storage or treatment capacity at their sewage works for well over 20 years, and they have been allowed by our governments to operate – financially and practically – with no fair balance between company profits and service to the public. Worse still, now that the financial mismanagement of the industry is being revealed, the companies expect government and the public to bail them out.
Untreated sewage permits
In May 2016, in an attempt to bring order to the situation, government allowed the companies to purchase ‘consents’ (permits or licenses) to release untreated sewage into our rivers.
Government did this, it claimed, in order to prevent the backflow of untreated sewage into people’s homes: an event that has a far lower occurrence than is claimed (and which could be countered by creating extra basic storage space at the sewage works). And not only did government make this barely forgivable concession, it allowed the companies to pollute by paying for a license using money that the public was supplying from their annual water bills.
Worse still, the permit system effectively allows the water companies to choose to pollute more by buying a licence, rather than invest in new sewage treatment capacity: once again using the public’s money.
One alternative would be the provision of low-cost storage tanks with chlorine treatment that is well-aerated before discharge to remove the chlorine without harmful consequence to rivers. Another would be to pasteurise the discharge using solar energy (as happens in India). Either option would still cost less than many of the fines imposed for exceeding a licence’s limits.
What is the consequence of this licensed pollution to river life?
The pathogenic (harmful) bacteria from raw sewage can make some fish ill. Some strains of E coli and salmonella bacteria have been found to cause infection in fish.
Increased discharge levels of poorly-treated or untreated sewage into rivers means the sewage decomposes in the river. This can, at times, cause the mass mortality of fish because the process of decomposition consumes all the oxygen that is dissolved in the water, and fish need that oxygen to breathe. Even ‘treated sewage’ can have the same depleting effect on dissolved oxygen levels, especially if the treatment is incomplete or poor.
Discharges of poorly-treated and untreated sewage has a detrimental effect on the nutrient load in the river’s water, and results in growths of ‘sewage fungus’ on the river bed. These are colonies of bacteria, such as Sphaerotilus natans, rather than actual fungi.
Both these effects – nutrient load and sewage fungus – cause a general disruption of normal ecological processes. Excessive phosphate loads, in particular, in river water lead to clouds of algae that form mats on the riverbed, and the underside of these algal mats harbour biofilms – long-lived colonies of different, often pathogenic, bacteria and other microbes that that co-exist together. The biofilm colony as a whole is protected by an outer coating. Harmful bacteria breed in these biofilms, and some of these bacteria exchange genes between one another, and can also emit harmful toxins.
Antibiotic resistance and multidrug resistance
By around 1990, antibiotic resistance to individual antibiotics had become well developed, restricting those that we could use and also slightly increasing the pathogenicity of resistant diseases. As more antibiotics have been deployed, bacteria have become resistant to more than one antibiotic, ending up with some bacterial diseases being resistant to many antibiotics, known as multidrug resistance.
With this has come a large catalogue of other problems. For example, as bacteria have evolved they have developed increased capabilities to ensure they can more readily attach themselves to the cells they want to invade, and a whole series of these new capabilities or virulence factors have developed. Also, bacteria in biofilms are able to receive genes from other bacteria in the biofilm by means of horizontal transfer, and this ability even extends to acquiring genes from different species of bacteria. Thus, inside a biofilm, bacteria that have developed a particular form of resistance to antibiotics are able to transfer it to other bacteria, even bacteria of a different type (species), by means of gene transfer. In short, antibiotic resistance can very easily spread.
As a result, pathogenic bacteria have begun to become even more infectious, leading to higher mortalities in hospitals. One of the more recent developments in the virulence factors associated with biofilms is the capacity of biofilms to create thicker outer coatings to protect themselves. In hospitals, especially, this has led to difficulties in treating certain illnesses, and to an overloading of hospital intensive care units (ICUs). Virulence factors have also led to increased infectivity and harmfulness of these bacteria, and thus even more deaths.
Had full sewage treatment been used, multidrug resistance would have taken years longer to develop, and tens of thousands of lives could have been saved in the UK alone. Full sewage treatment must be implemented now.
The importing of new diseases
New disease bacteria have started to come in from overseas, as a result of international travel, notably two highly lethal ones. These are Klebsiella which spreads via contact with faeces and causes pneumonia and infections of the bloodstream, and Acinetobacter which spreads by person to person contact, causing pneumonia, urinary and bloodstream infections, and has become very resistant to treatment by antibiotics.
Both diseases were relatively harmless, but due to repeated exposure to antibiotics they have developed multidrug resistance and are now among the most dangerous disease bacteria in the UK. Klebsiella and Actinobacter are top of the World Health Organisation’s 2024 list of Priority Pathogens, and they have begun to overload our ICUs.
Added to that, is the import of new pathogenic and multi-antibiotic resistant forms of E Coli, notably E Coli 0157. These harmful forms of E Coli are resistant to the carbapenem group of antibiotics that treat carbapenemase infections, and they are appearing regionally in UK.
The mortalities of all these diseases are age-related, primarily affecting young children, but even more lethal to the elderly.
Thus, as the use of antibiotics has developed into multidrug resistance, what started out at the time of water industry’s privatisation in the early 1980s as a world populated by largely single strains of a particular bacteria, has now been transformed into a world where these single species have literally thousands of subspecies, and their genetics is becoming highly complicated. As result, the dependability of antibiotics as a means of treatment in modern medicine is becoming increasingly precarious.
Transmission of sewage bacteria from rivers into communities
There are several different means by which these bacteria are transmitted. They can be passed on by seagulls forced inland for food, by wild animals and, of course, by humans between themselves. However, the most efficient way is by wind-borne bio-aerosols. Our river surfaces are vast, and if you watch a river closely, you will see fairly continuous minute bubbles coming to the surface. These bubbles carry tiny bits of sediment and there are always bacteria bound to this sediment. Very few of these bacteria are needed to carry infections as they are highly contagious.
This method is the subject of scientific papers, and I have personally observed and confirmed it from bacteria in bio-aerosols collected at river surface level and some miles away. Bacteria are also aerosolised at sewage treatment works, and were found in town, on shop and bus handles: in fact, everywhere I sampled.
The spread of pathogenic bacteria can lead, especially in immuno-compromised people, to sepsis and a higher rate of mortality, all exacerbated by the dumping of raw sewage in our rivers.
I have also related them as the bacterial cause of infections in local hospitals, caused by the predominance of sewage-borne bacteria and increased disinfectant resistance. I am totally convinced that escalating deaths are caused by bacteria from the untreated sewage in our rivers.
The lesson and imperative for us is simple: we must build larger sewage works so that we can stop dumping raw sewage into our rivers and seas. If we do not, the complexity of diseases and mortality rates will continue to worsen until, at some point, our antibiotic armoury fails. Then, serious trouble will follow.
