River Ganges

The majority of this text is taken from another article on this topic. I have added some commentary and notes in some places, but the content has remained broadly the same. 

             The river Ganges with its source in the mighty Himalayan mountains is considered to be the most sacred river by Hindus. The waters of Ganga is believed to be self cleansing in nature and it is said that a single dip in the waters of this holy river can wash away one’s sins. However, people tend to attribute this to religious / theistic reasons and an objective scientific analysis of this has rarely been done, and in cases where it has been done, its results are not known to most people. The objective of this article is to share some scientific insight for the alleged purity and “cleansing property” of the water of river Ganges.

              It is almost bizarre that even though the last rites of the thousands of Hindus are performed at the numerous ghats along the shores of Ganga at the holy sites like Kashi, Varanasi etc, even though thousands of human bodies are consigned to this river and even though Millions of Hindus take bath in the waters of this river everyday – there is no sign of contagious diseases spreading from person to person due to contact through this river water. Nor is there any reported and statistically significant sign of skin disorders etc after bathing in the Ganges. So what is the secret behind its water?

                In 1896, E. Hanbury Hankin (a British physician) after testing the water of Ganga wrote in a paper published in the French journal Annales de IInstitut Pasteur. The bacterium Vibrio Cholerae which causes the deadly Cholera disease, when put into the waters of Ganga died within three hours. However, the same bacteria continued to thrive in distilled water even after 48 hours. He went on to suggest that the water of this river and its tributary Yamuna were responsible for containing the spread of this deadly disease cholera in the region in those days. C.E. Nelson, another British physician noticed that, the waters of Ganga when taken even from one of its dirtiest mouths at Hooghly in Kolkata, by the ships returning to England, remained fresh throughout the long journey. Normally river water begins to become stale over a period of time due to lack of oxygen which promotes the growth of anaerobic bacteria, which in turn gives rise to the smell of stale water.

                 In 1927, Flix dHerelle , a French microbiologist, was amazed when he saw that only a few feet below the bodies of persons floating in the Ganga who had died of dysentery and cholera, where one would expect millions of germs, there were no germs at all. In other words, people had for thousands of years rightly believed that Ganga purifies the dead bodies, which is why probably the bodies of even those who died of infectious diseases were offered to this river for purification!

Recent Research.

Recent Research

                             D.S. Bhargava, an Indian environmental engineer/professor of hydrology has spent a life time studying the amazing properties of Ganges. He measured the remarkable self cleansing ability of Ganges in an exhaustive three year study which showed that Ganges is able to reduce its biochemical oxygen demand levels much faster than other rivers. Bhargava says that the self-purifying quality of this river leads to oxygen levels that are 25 times higher than any other river in the world.The Ganges cleans up suspended wastes 15 to 20 times faster when compared to other rivers! In a study conducted by the Malaria Research Center in New Delhi it was observes that the water from the upper reaches of Ganga did not host mosquito breeding, and also prevented mosquito breeding in any water it was added to. On the other hand, water from other rivers were shown to allow mosquito breeding!

                         There are two major factors which give Ganges its unique abilities
1. The presence of Bacteriophages which gives it the anti-bacterial nature.
2. An unknown factor which gives this river an unusual ability to retain dissolved oxygen from the atmosphere. This might be due to its high concentration of bacteriophage, but this link has not yet been established

What is Bacteriophage ?

                                       Bacteriophage are those viruses which kill bacteria. What a cat is to a mouse, the bacteriophage is to a bacterium. In fact what Hankin reported in 1896 about the antibacterial nature of Ganges was the first modern observation/documentation of a Bacteriophage It was Herelle, (who again observed the anti-bacterial nature of Ganges) who coined the term Bacteriophage (meaning bacteria eater ) for these viruses. The high levels of oxygen in the waters of Ganga gives it the unique ability to remain fresh over a prolonged period of time. The waters of Ganga when added to other water resources in adequate amount, causes the bacteriophage in it to quickly multiply cleaning the new water resource of any bacteria present in it. Which is why the ancient Indians used to take Ganga jal back home to clean their local water resources. People practice it even today, except that most of them dont know the actual reason.

                               In other words, the water of river Ganga can be an alternative for using antibiotics to treat bacterial diseases. In fact it was in the former Soviet Union that the most active research about using bacteriophages to treat bacterial diseases was done at the George Eliava Institute ! This research institute was co-founded by George Eliava and Felix DHerelle after D’Herelle introduced Eliava to the wonderful world of Bacteriophages following his experiments with the water of the Ganges.

The death of anti-biotics?

                                 Today more and more bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. The world is running out of antibiotics! We need an alternative, & a potential alternative is Bacteriophage therapy.

The emergence of pathogenic bacteria resistant to most, if not all, currently available antimicrobial agents has become a critical problem in modern medicine, particularly because of the concomitant increase in immuno-suppressed patients. The concern that humankind is reentering the preantibiotics era has become very real, and the development of alternative anti-infection modalities has become one of the highest priorities of modern medicine and biotechnology. - Source Phage International

Phage Therapy Research in India

GangaGen Biotechnologies , a bio-medical research company based out of Bangalore, is now leading the alternative therapy of Bacteriophage based treatment for antibiotic resistant bacteria. It is the first firm to have developed bacteriophage based commercial products. Their first bacteriophage based product was to treat the problem of E.Coli in Cattle.

The content of this article is almost similar to its original article.
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