A thousand Nokia residents believed to have had symptoms after consuming contaminated drinking water

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At the Nokia Health Centre, 84 patients suffering from severe diarrhoea were treated between Friday and Sunday. For most of the patients a couple of hours of intravenous drip proved a sufficient remedy.
      In all, around a thousand residents of the city of Nokia, close to Tampere, are believed to have had symptoms after having consumed contaminated drinking water last week.
     
The fact that processed effluent was accidentally mixed with drinking water has been known since Friday.
      The Nokia Health Centre and the Nokia Waterworks tried to warn the 10,000 residents living in the area of the tainted water network. In addition the Finnish Broadcasting Company, text television services, the Nokian Sanomat daily, as well as the City of Nokia Internet pages warned people of the danger. Nevertheless, some never received the message.
      Based on the number of received phone queries by the Nokia Health Centre, chief surgeon Eila Kujansuu estimates that around a thousand people have experienced symptoms.
      Today, Monday, every household in the area will receive written instructions concerning the use of water.
     
The situation is not over, even though the chlorine amount in the tap water is now six times the average. Now the water smells of chlorine, before it just smelled bad.
      The Internet pages of Nokia and Pirkkala advise people to boil their water for a minimum of five minutes.
      Unboiled water must not be consumed, and dishwashers have to be set to the hottest possible programme.
      The bath water for very small children should also be boiled first in case some water splashes into the child’s mouth.
      The boiling of water should be continued at least for a week.
     
A diarrhoea epidemic was expected at the Health Centre ever since it became clear that the vent that separates the drinking water from the processed waste water at the Nokia Waterworks had been open from Wednesday till Friday.
      No less than 450 cubic metres of effluent cleansed from solid residue had ended up in the tap water network. In the initial analyses, excrement and sewage-based bacteria have been discovered in the tap water samples, the taking of which was commenced on Friday.
      The flushing of the pipes is already in progress. The local residents have been urged to run water from taps for 15 minutes twice a day.
     
The entire episode is unique. "As far as I know, never before has processed sewage water been mixed with drinking water in Finland", says Finnish Water and Waste Water Works Association (FIWA) expert Riku Vanhala.


Links:
  Nokia, Finland (Wikipedia)

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