The Thirst for Water

15:58Neil Turner:What about getting clearer skin?

16:01Yael Velleman:Like many things to do with thirst and drinking, very little actual evidence that it does.

16:07Neil Turner:That's an interesting one because you often hear that. You often hear, oh, what you need to do is drink lots of water and you'll have a lovely clear skin. Not really true then.

16:14Yael Velleman:I don't think so.

16:16Neil Turner:Reducing headaches.

16:18Yael Velleman:Well, headache can be a sign of dehydration. So I'm not going to say no to that. In some people, maybe they've ignored the thirst and they're getting the headache and it's a sign. I don't think it's generally found to be useful as a remedy for general ordinary headaches or migraine headaches. Some people might.

16:39Neil Turner:And then the final one was making you feel better. I guess if you're thirsty and then you get some water, certainly when it's hot like it has been here in the UK recently, then you feel better, don't you, when you get to drink some water?

16:49Yael Velleman:Yes.

16:50Neil Turner:And we've been speaking mostly about water so far. Neil, I know you mentioned liking a cup of tea, which I do too. But, of course, the liquid that we use to survive doesn't have to be plain water. So we asked our listeners around the world to tell us a bit more about what they regularly drink where they live. And here's what Lubov Kostova from Bulgaria and before her, Andy Filidoro from Argentina told us.

17:14Yael Velleman:Mate, it's a traditional Argentinian and South American drink. And it comes from a plant, like a tea plant, which is original from Paraguay, North Argentina and South Brazil. And it began with the Guarani culture. Mate is not just a drink. It implies a whole ritual to prepare it and it is a synonym of gathering. In family, friends or working environments, there is a moment where someone starts the mate and is the person pouring it that shares his mate with his mate. This is a traditional way of drinking it and it implies a cultural moment of sharing among beers. Ayran is a mixture of Bulgarian yogurt with water and some add to it a dash of salt

18:18Neil Turner:which actually makes it a really good drink during the summer when you sweat a lot and lose a lot of the salt in you.

18:25Yael Velleman:Then you can turn that into a little bit more sophisticated version or the Bulgarian cold soup in inverted commas. It's yogurt and water and cucumber and garlic and parsley, sort of think of diluted tzatziki. And it is especially popular. We actually have it instead of soup or on the go in a cup.

18:51Neil Turner:You can really take that with you all day long. And a particular favorite of mine, but I know I share this with other people as well, is slices of watermelon. Watermelon with pieces of Bulgarian white cottage cheese, which makes a lovely salad. And it's very, very refreshing during the summer as well. That sounds lovely. Have any of you tried any of these things, yerba mate or this Iran, the salty yogurt drink?

19:22Claudia Hammond:Yeah, both. I grew up in a community with a lot of Argentinians, so we've had a lot of mate over the years.

19:30Neil Turner:Yeah, yeah. And what about you? What about either of you? Have you tried these things?

19:33Yael Velleman:No, I don't think I have. You must have had lassi, though, in Delhi. Plenty of lassis, yes. Which is salted or sweetened yogurt.

19:40Neil Turner:Yeah, so will all these other things hydrate us in the same way? I mean, even things like tea or, I don't know, beer, you sometimes hear, well, those things are only going to dehydrate you.

19:49Yael Velleman:Yeah, some people think that things with alcohol in and things with caffeine in don't count as fluid. Well, they do. Of course they do.

19:56Neil Turner:And the amounts of water or the amounts of liquid that you can get from food can be quite big, can't they? So watermelon was mentioned there. But I was reading about pizza even being 40 % water, which you would not think of pizza as having lots of water in it. I suppose you pour it into the dough when you make it.

20:13Yael Velleman:No, it's right. Almost all food contains quite a lot of water and some contains huge amounts of water, but particularly fruit. Watermelon is a particular example and vegetables are mostly water. So yeah, up to half of your intake of water can come from food.

20:31Neil Turner:That's really amazing. And does our sense of thirst, Neil, change over the lifespan? You sometimes hear people saying that older people don't always drink enough water. Is that something to do with thirst or is that a bit of a myth?

20:43Yael Velleman:I think it's a myth. I think we heard earlier about the importance of being able to access water. And we were talking about healthy people. But if you're unwell and you can't reach the water by your bed, then you can run to these tragedies of people becoming dehydrated in care homes or even in hospitals just because they aren't being offered the water. Or they may not be able to ask for it. So yes, being able to access it, even elderly people, if they are well, will drink enough.

21:18Neil Turner:And Yale, I guess worldwide, being able to get water in hospital and for hospitals to run a tour must be hugely important.

21:25Claudia Hammond:Absolutely. I mean, I've personally seen many healthcare facilities and hospitals without running water. And it's absolutely terrifying. Even if you do have a hospital with a water supply, it's not always available at the point of care. So when a medical professional is examining or delivering a baby, are their hands clean? Is the surface on which the babies are delivered clean? Many times you'll find that it isn't. And we have a high risk of sepsis, of healthcare-acquired infections. Consequently, people are having to be treated as a preventive measure with antibiotics, which then contributes to antimicrobial resistance, which is a really important emerging threat.

22:10Claudia Hammond:So people have got to have antibiotics just because there wasn't clean water there when they're in hospital? Absolutely, absolutely. And as was mentioned, water really is an unequal issue. And it's usually tied to levels of income and social and economic factors. So in these circumstances where we don't have even water, We can't even think about having things like alcohol-based hand rubs or the kinds of alcohol gels that we sometimes carry around and use with us to keep us safe. But beyond that, I think it's a habit of public health people to think just about the physical health of people. But just the dignity of it, thinking about the possibility of having to give birth in a healthcare facility with no running water, no functional toilet.

23:02Claudia Hammond:The indignity of that, the impact on the way that you feel, and also the impact on whether or not you're going to choose to come and deliver your child in a healthcare facility like that. You might just choose to stay at home and then you're exposing yourself and your baby to other kinds of risks.

23:19Neil Turner:So it sounds as though the knock-on effects of not having access to clean water are greater than you might think, that it can affect health in all sorts of ways. So that is the present, but we are breaking for the BBC News now. and after that we're going to look to the future. We'll be discussing what evidence we need next to better understand the relationship between hydration and health as well as how water access might be changing with the climate. I'm Claudia Hammond and I'll be back soon with Yael Velleman, Anthony Acciavati and Neil Turner and our audience here at Welcome Collection for the second part of the Evidence from the BBC.

23:56Thank you.

24:28Yael Velleman:Thank you. I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment, the award-winning storytelling podcast from KQED. Every week, Snap deals a new card, like the girl whose sister was a monkey, the man who lived in the woods for 30 years, or the woman who snuck her lover out of prison in a dog crate. Pick a card, any card. Snap Judgment from KQED. New episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

25:08Neil Turner:Hello, I'm Claudia Hammond. Welcome back to The Evidence from the BBC. I'm in the reading room at Welcome Collection in London with a live audience and hundreds of medical books and artworks relating to health. And today we are talking about water, how we get it, who has it and how this affects our health. Now we talked about the current situation around the world, but next we are looking to the future. And on my panel, I have Yael Velleman, who's Director of Policy and Innovation at Unlimit Health. Anthony Acciavati, who's an architect whose work on groundwater features in the exhibition Thirst here at Wellcome Collection.

25:47Neil Turner:And Neil Turner, a kidney expert or nephrologist and emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh. Now, Anthony, your expertise is in this water found in the ground rather than collected from rain in reservoirs. How much does dependency on groundwater vary around the world?

26:05Yael Velleman:It varies quite a lot in terms of areas that depend upon it. But generally, areas where you have private groundwater extraction, it's because there's either no municipal water supply, it's unreliable or polluted. And so then you might think places that seem to have almost nothing in common, like the Sonoran Desert with Phoenix, Tucson, Jakarta, New Delhi, Addis Ababa would have such different relationships with water, but yet they all have very similar patterns of urbanization because of the atomistic approach to a very decentralized system of privately extracting groundwater.

26:47Neil Turner:If you get water up from one of these tube wells, does it have to be clean before you can drink it?

26:53Yael Velleman:Well, so tube wells were originally introduced, especially in parts of South Asia as a means of providing potable water because surface water bodies were oftentimes polluted or unreliable. So there's a public health dimension to the idea that you could drop groundwater and drink it. We know though that with heavy metals or things like arsenic, you really have to do reverse osmosis, which is to push the water through a kind of membrane to be able to make it potable. So most groundwater, I would say, you can't just drink straight out of the tap, though millions and millions of people do.

27:30Neil Turner:And if you take too much water out from under the ground, is it going to run out or can it replace itself in some places?

27:37Yael Velleman:So it really varies. So in a place like, let's say, in Saudi Arabia or Arizona, in Saudi Arabia, when they're drawing up groundwater, that's usually referred to is fossilized water, so it's 30 ,000 years old.

27:50Neil Turner:You're drinking 30 ,000 year old water? Yes.

27:53Yael Velleman:Wow. And in Arizona, it's just a little bit younger, 20 to 24 ,000 years old. But in a place like, let's say, in northern, in the Indo-Gangetic plains of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, sometimes that water is 6, 12, 18 months old, depending upon how you're extracting it. So it really varies in terms of the water table level and the kinds of soils that it's in. So that depends a lot on the kind of age and quality of the water. And then there's also all kinds of unintended consequences that happen with over extraction in terms of subsidence.

28:29Neil Turner:Yeah, what happens if you take too much?

28:31Yael Velleman:So when you take too much, subsidence is when the water is being extracted faster than it's replenished in the soil, so it compacts. So think of it almost like when fruit dehydrates, it gets smaller. So when that happens, it can cause sometimes kilometer-long cracks in the earth. It can cause sinkholes. And this doesn't respect public or private property whatsoever. So in much the same way that we think of a hurricane or a tornado as not really caring if it's hitting public or private property, the overextraction of groundwater can cause buildings to sink. It can cause foundations to crack, huge sinkholes to open up in streets and in landscapes and cities and outside of them.

29:15Yael Velleman:So it creates quite a bit of havoc and it's why cities like Jakarta and Mexico City are sinking faster than say Venice because of the amount of extraction that they do.

29:25Neil Turner:And I've even seen research suggesting that the extraction of groundwater is causing the earth to tilt, which kind of seems extraordinary.

29:34Yael Velleman:So it's estimated that between 1993 and 2010 the Earth shifted its axis by about 80 centimetres because of how much groundwater we collectively take out. That's more than the melt of Greenland and Antarctica. So this kind of decentralised system which really has allowed billions of people to thrive is threatening to bleed parts of the Earth dry as well as, of course, at a planetary scale shift its axis of the earth.

30:02Neil Turner:And this is hard, isn't it, Yale? Because people need this water. So you can see why people would want to get water from these wells. We've heard how essential it is.

30:10Claudia Hammond:Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important to remember that people don't just use the one source. So when we talk about X number of people have access, what does that actually mean? So one example for that, an area of eastern Uganda that I've been to several times, people do have I guess you could say relatively good levels of access to borehole water so similar to the kind of water that you're referring to and they use that water but only for drinking because the water is quite hard they can't really use it for cooking because it spoils the rice it spoils the beans they don't use it for laundry because the soap doesn't lather as much so whilst they have good access to improved water on paper they're still having to use contaminated river water where there's a risk of parasitic infection every single day for these other domestic needs so you know people do what they need to do to meet their daily needs and sometimes it puts them at risk but health isn't always the main priority water is always more

31:18Neil Turner:urgent yeah so anthony if there is subsidence could that then have an impact on on health i guess i guess water that's that's not clean that's dirty could then inundate places very much so so

31:30Yael Velleman:you have uh when also when you have so many privately owned bore wells or tube wells that offers an opportunity for waste water and contaminants just from the surface to enter into the aquifer. So then you can end up quite literally consuming your own excrement. Or you can have lots of microplastics get in. And once things are inside the earth, it's very hard to get them out. So it becomes a major public health concern as well when so many people are tapping into a shared aquifer, yet we don't usually think of it as being shared in the way that air is. yet a commons like an aquifer is so vital to so many millions and millions of people in many cities and landscapes across the world.

32:16Neil Turner:And Yale, when we're thinking about access to water in the future, how much of an issue is climate change there?

32:22Claudia Hammond:It's quite a big issue for different reasons and it can sometimes get a bit complicated. You can have a situation where there's not enough water, so increased aridity. you could also have too much water all at the same time and the combination of drought followed by by too much rain can cause flooding which can then lead to disease outbreaks. A really good example of that we have at the moment in Zambia where there's an ongoing cholera outbreak which is quite severe. They had a couple of years of drought, which then were followed by severe flooding, causing damage to infrastructure, displacing people from their homes.

33:11Claudia Hammond:But also, one of the major dams on the Zambezi River, the Kariba Dam, which is a hydroelectric power dam, stopped functioning because there wasn't enough water. Then there's no electricity. No electricity means the pumps for the boreholes stop functioning as well. No running water, no flushing of toilets and then that also increases the risk. And then just to add to the sort of nexus between all of these issues, that means that Zambia is having to fire more coal which then potentially contributes to more climate change and the cycle begins all over again.

33:52Neil Turner:And Anthony I've also seen the suggestion that the use of groundwater might one day increase antimicrobial resistance how would

34:01Yael Velleman:that happen well so one of the issues that I think is a kind of slow moving crisis but one that is not being studied enough is this issue of antimicrobial resistant genes so you have the over use or prescription oftentimes actually not even prescribed of antibiotics in places especially in New Delhi and around Lahore in South Asia. And there's a real concern, we've already started to see AMR appear in surface water bodies, but given that so many millions of people depend upon groundwater, there's a real concern, especially with wastewater percolating into groundwater, that we're going to start to find AMR also in groundwater, which is an incredibly problematic condition if that does happen.

34:47Neil Turner:So is the idea the antibiotics reach the wastewater because they go through our bodies and the wastewater reaches the clean water and this is how it could be polluted.

34:56Yael Velleman:Yes, so we have those kind of antimicrobial resistant genes that are effectively in surface water bodies and then percolating down into groundwater, oftentimes through wastewater, is where we're imagining the vector might be.

35:09Claudia Hammond:Is this a concern you've heard about in the world of water? Yes, absolutely. And just to add to the human part of the infection, we also have a lot of antibiotics used in livestock rearing and then run off from that as well as from any industry including pharmaceutical industries that release water with antibiotics. All of that creates a pressure on the environment and increases the likelihood of resistance emerging as well.

35:41Neil Turner:And is groundwater likely to become less safe in the future?

35:45Yael Velleman:I think it really varies from place to place. So I've been quite amazed on the one hand how much we take out. We take out 959 cubic kilometers. That's two Lake Eries or 127 Loch Nesss here in the UK. And yet that is obviously going to increase. But then there's been areas of the world, say, in South Delhi in India, where communities have come together and they've recharged the aquifer. So where they had subsidence or sinking come together using rainwater harvesting to actually recharge it so the ground actually starts to go back up, which is hard on buildings because most buildings don't like to move up and down so much.

36:25Yael Velleman:But there are great examples of ways in which in the future, I think, going forward, we can think of this more collectively and start to recharge them and understand groundwater access is not a privatized atomistic condition, but really one that ought to be shared. But the first step, I think, is really how do we start to visualize that shared commons? Because we have ways of sharing the way we understand the air, but we still really lack visualizations of the interior of the Earth and how we extract so much of it to terraform the surface.

36:56Neil Turner:And is it true that there might be more freshwater underneath the sea, which sort of seems like a counterintuitive idea? How does that work?

37:04Yael Velleman:Yes, so there's quite a bit of research being done, some of it being done now in Italy, just off the coast, the Adriatic, to study if there are in fact aquifers underneath the Adriatic and other seas and oceans here on the planet. A lot of that's been undetected because of the ways in which we go about modeling groundwater. It's mostly based upon differential in gravitational pull of the Earth. So it's done through satellites. And so there's prospecting that's happening now to see if there's groundwater or aquifers quite literally under the beds of the sea, which maybe in the future we'll need to rely on if we start to run out of potable water.

37:47Neil Turner:Now, of course, if people can't get enough water, there is a risk of dehydration. And Neil, we were talking earlier about how we're often encouraged to drink more water. And if plenty is available, then it's easy to forget how critical it is. Of course, when it's precious, you think about it a lot. So I want to look a bit at what happens in the body when you don't have enough water. What is dehydration exactly?

38:10Yael Velleman:So we often refer to dehydration in two slightly different ways. So one is when you're just short of water, when you haven't had access to water. And because water is such a large proportion of us, you don't need to lose very much of your total body water before you start feeling not just thirsty but ill. and eventually because water is 90 % of blood eventually your blood pressure drops which means that your heart can't pump your kidneys don't work, nothing works and yes, so it can quite quickly be fatal if you become severely dehydrated of course the other way we become dehydrated is through excessive losses so if you have cholera, torrential diarrhea or if you bleed or lose fluid because your guts aren't working, you're vomiting, all of these things lead to you potentially quite rapidly decompensating and becoming very seriously ill.

39:12Neil Turner:And it's a really short time, isn't it, that the body can manage without water for compared with food?

39:16Yael Velleman:Yeah, I think, and presumably these are from temperate climates, you can't survive many days without water, but you can survive weeks without food.

39:27Neil Turner:And do you know why that is? Why are humans so at risk from dehydration? I was reading that a mouse can go without water for longer than we can.

39:35Yael Velleman:We don't really store water. We're not camels. So we do depend on having the intake every day to keep the equilibrium going there. And we do need enough water to produce urine. Otherwise, the toxins which the body generates naturally, without you having to be drinking toxins, will accumulate and you'll get sick from your kidneys not working. So I guess it just illustrates how vitally important it is that we do keep the body's metabolic systems just at the right level. Homeostasis, keeping things the same.

40:10Neil Turner:So, Yale, it's very clear that we need water, but are we likely to see more people experiencing a lack of water in the future? Is it going to go the wrong way, if you like?

40:19Claudia Hammond:Well, it seems to not be going the right way fast enough. So, for example, if we were to meet the sustainable development goal on drinking water and sanitation by 2030, for water we would need to be investing six times more than we are now. And that's even without taking into consideration the inequality between different regions and between different countries. We're moving at different pace. So, for example, about 70 % of the world has access, but in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, it's only just over 30%. For sanitation, we'd need to be investing a lot more again, and for hygiene, probably about 13 times more than we're spending at the moment.

41:12Claudia Hammond:It's also important to keep in mind that we've got more pressures now on water supply than we have had before. So it's not just climate, it's also global conflict, instability, the financial crisis. All of these things are contributing to instability and displacement. And it's very telling to see that just from the beginning of 2025, we've already had 100 ,000 people infected with cholera and over 1 ,700 deaths. It is something that we're very concerned about and is becoming worse.

41:46Neil Turner:And isn't there more pressure on funding as well? You say you need 13 times more funding. This is the moment where there's a funding crisis in global health.

41:54Claudia Hammond:Yes, there is. And sadly, we've seen a very big global player, the US, pulling funding out of global health and development overall, which is a really big source of concern, and also pulling out of the World Health Organization, which is going to undermine how we do things. But there are positive stories out there and where there is good leadership and where leaders understand that development is the result of and not a precursor to improving access to water supply sanitation and better housing we are seeing good examples out there.

42:36Neil Turner:What sorts of things so are there are there successes that we could learn from as we go forwards?

42:41Claudia Hammond:Yeah there There are. So historically, East Asia is a good example. So countries like Singapore and South Korea that have placed improvements in water supply and sanitation as fundamental to their development story, if you like, and that has come from the highest levels of government. More modern examples, countries like Rwanda and Botswana that are doing very well. And again, because at the highest level of government, the leadership of the country is placing those improvements to health and well-being as fundamental to development and not waiting for development to happen before they can invest in that.

43:20Neil Turner:Yeah. Can it be quite hard to get people to invest in water? Is it less obvious why that's useful to an economy as, say, investing in, I don't know, roads or broadband?

43:29Claudia Hammond:Yes, absolutely. It is harder and for various reasons. One is that it does cost a lot of money. Spending needs to be done and the benefits might take a while to see. So we're talking about, you know, 5, 10, sometimes 20 years, a generational impact of these improvements. That's not always very attractive to politicians who are thinking just about their next election campaign. So it can be a bit of a hard sell. And historically, investment in the social sectors, which water supply and sanitation sometimes fall into, has seen as a kind of net cost to the economy rather than a long-term investment.

44:14Claudia Hammond:And that's a mindset that still needs to be challenged and shifted.

44:18Neil Turner:Well, it is time for our audience at Wellcome Collection in London to get the chance to ask their questions now. So what else do you want to know about hydration, health, climate change, disease, how it all fits together, any of those things? Do put your hand up if you'd like to ask a question. Oh, lots of questions. Yes, there's somebody in the second row just here.

44:36Claudia Hammond:Thank you. I have one question for Neil and one question which is both for Anthony and Yale. If you're in a restaurant in London, would you order tap water or mineral water? Why? and for Anthony and Yale there's another metric that we often use which is the litres per day per capita in the global south it's probably around 100, 130 in the global north it's much more how valuable do you think is this as a metric to understand parity in water

45:07Neil Turner:as infrastructure and water supply? Thank you for those so Neil, in a restaurant in London and I suppose it doesn't matter where you are would you have tap water or mineral water?

45:17Yael Velleman:I would always have tap water, unless I was particularly keen on having effervescent fizzy water. London tap water, UK tap water is very safe. And no, there's no reason to do otherwise. And it's an awful waste of plastic or glass to be drinking stuff that is more engineered than it needs to be.

45:39Neil Turner:Yael, can you explain to us this metric of litres per day? Is this all the water that people use per day?

45:47Claudia Hammond:And so it normally takes into account everything from drinking, eating, cooking, cleaning, flushing the toilet, having a shower, going for a swim. And not just what you do in your own household, but also what happens when you go to work, when you go to school, when you go to health facility. Basically, all of that. I think it is a useful metric. It does definitely show the disparities. and if you're living in a city and you've only got the bare minimum that you need to survive, which is 15 litres a day, that doesn't get you very far. It won't help you to keep your clothes clean and your house clean and your basic hygiene needs looked after.

46:36Claudia Hammond:Anthony, do you think it's a useful measure?

46:38Yael Velleman:I think it's certainly useful but I also think that as more and more parts of the world face water scarcity and insecurity, they're going to have to learn from places that, you know, economize water. So I think, you know, a bakka shower in northern India is so common, and I think probably more and more parts of the world are going to have to do that, which would reduce the amount of water that you consume. So I think that in some ways, more and more parts of the world are going to look and have to adapt in the way that, say, places that have water scarcity or have water abundance and drought oftentimes have developed a very different choreography.

47:17Yael Velleman:So I think it's certainly useful. But I think it can also be pedagogical in teaching other people how to live better too.

47:25Neil Turner:Thank you. Let's take another question. Yes, one there, and then we'll go towards the back. Electrolytes have become really trendy over the last few months slash years. I wanted to know what are the benefits, and are they really beneficial? sure or is it really a sign of privilege we have in the global north and if we could uh potentially well my question was would it be actually quite helpful um for those living in the global south to meet the need the health needs and requirements that they require yeah yeah so neil you see a lot of these electrolyte drinks now are they are they are they good and could they be helpful in the

48:02Yael Velleman:global south so i think the evidence for electrolyte drinks um improving performance comes from very high level performance i don't think that for the average amateur athlete it's going to make much difference the reason they're about is because they're heavily advertised and people are making a lot of money out of them and you can say the same for a lot of other things

48:24Neil Turner:including a lot of other drinks but could they be useful in places where people don't have enough water?

48:30Yael Velleman:Well, there are electrolyte solutions for people who are losing fluid very rapidly, and they've been absolutely life-saving in cholera epidemics, for instance. But there isn't a real need for it. Most diets will include enough of the electrolytes that we must have.

48:49Neil Turner:So I think we've got time for one more question. Yes, just here in the front.

48:55Claudia Hammond:hello my question is for yale um if we consider that water is a human right as united nations has said like a few years ago do you think does it make sense is it right for to leave water for private companies to manage and also having water as a commodity in stock market like yes what about the owning of water yeah that's that's really difficult um and i here i might be starting to use my opinion but um water uh from the nature of it is is not something that is very uh amenable to privatization um it's the kind of thing that tends to be um monopolized by a single provider and therefore the market doesn't function the way that you would like a market to function.

49:53Claudia Hammond:Where we are seeing models work better is where water isn't necessarily privatized, but it's commercialized so that the services themselves are running better, so that more people can afford to have water connections, for example, and paying a more reasonable tariff. And it's important to point out that people living in conditions of poverty often pay more for water because they're having to buy it through more expensive routes. So paying for water by the jerry can is more expensive than having a water connection and paying a water bill. So, yeah, I don't think that privatization has proved to work very well.

50:41Claudia Hammond:and there's a lot that we can do to make sure that the human right to water is realised.

50:48Neil Turner:So drinking water is absolutely crucial for every one of us but something we might not think about all that much unless we haven't got any and then of course that's all you think about. Now thank you so much to our panel, Neil Turner, Yael Bellaman and Anthony Acciavati and thank you to Welcome Collection for hosting us in their lovely reading room and to our studio engineers, Duncan Hannant and Emma Hart, and to the producer, Margaret Cesar Hawkins. Now, thank you to all of you in the audience for coming. I'm Claudia Hammond, and to hear more on global health, do join me every week on the BBC World Service for Health Check.

51:22Neil Turner:Bye for now. Thank you.

51:37Neil Turner:you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and You're Dead to Me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription.