10 Interesting Ways Water Can Kill You

Last Updated on January 7, 2021

There are two parameters for drinking water quality, chemical and microbiological. The chemical one tends to cause heavy metals’ buildups, which lead to chronic health risks, while microbiological parameters include E. coli, Coliform bacteria, and other pathogenic species of protozoan parasites, viruses, and bacteria.

Avalanche

Well, ice is water in its solid state. Although the adorable snowflakes are absolutely harmless separately, their strength eventually grows in numbers. An avalanche is a massive and deadly mass of speedy flowing snow down a slope, which occurs when the forces on the snow exceed its power.

During World War I, avalanches in the event of the mountain campaign in the Alps at the Austrian-Italian front have killed an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 soldiers.

Moreover, about 86% of avalanche-related deaths are due to suffocation. If you’ve ever found yourself caught in one and managed to make a small air space around your face, the heat from your breath will soon freeze that lifesaving empty space and may suffocate you within half an hour.

Less than half of those who are completely buried do survive while anyone buried deeper than 7 ft will never live to tell about it.

Holding Your Pee (Kind of)

Obviously, drinking water inevitably leads to urination. There is a common medical myth which states that you can die by holding and forcing yourself not to pee. In fact, you can die indirectly by developing a urinary tract infection which can later lead to death, but you cannot die from a ruptured bladder because you didn’t go to the bathroom.

It’s physically impossible for urine to keep being added into your bladder to the extent of rapture, moreover, other nearby organs cannot put enough pressure to cause the bladder to explode.

In the case of an obstruction, the kidneys are the first to fail, so by trying to hold it, the body would react violently to protect the kidneys, forcing urethral sphincters to fail and eventually the person wet themselves.