The women losing their hair because of the climate crisis

By Paul Homewood

h/t Patsy Lacey

The silliest climate story of the week must be this from the Independent:

Women in south Asia are becoming silent victims of an alarming side effect of the climate crisis as sources of clean water for drinking and bathing become more and more scarce – the loss of their hair.

In the coastal regions of Bangladesh, where over half of the water is tainted with salt and pollutants, women are walking back-breaking distances to fetch slightly safer water for drinking.

But with clean water being such a precious resource, women are bathing in hard water, which is not just leading to infections but is also causing them to lose their hair, laying bare the deeper wounds inflicted by the climate crisis.

In the Satkhira region in southwestern Bangladesh, where residents rely solely on rice crops and fishing for their livelihood, women say they are losing hair at an alarming rate. Some are worried about premature baldness, while others are selling their hair to vendors in an attempt to make ends meet.

“Women in the Satkhira region are living without the basics of clean water, decent toilets, and good hygiene, and the climate crisis is making it worse,” Anindita Hridita, programme lead on climate resilience at WaterAid Bangladesh, tells The Independent.

“They say continued exposure to contaminated water sources is not only causing dangerous waterborne diseases but also robbing them of their hair, an added layer of injustice in an already dire situation.”

Hridita and her team travelled through the region for days, collecting stories from women in the villages of Satkhira who are suffering through the multifaceted effects of the climate crisis.

“The water I bathe in causes my skin to get very dry, and I often get blisters,” shares Shyamoli Munda, a rice and fish farmer from Bhetkali village in Satkhira. “The blisters sometimes get so dry they bleed.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/women-hair-loss-climate-change-bangladesh-b2508529.html#comments-area

In reality, access to safe water has markedly improved in recent years in Bangladesh:

But the idea that Bangladeshi women would ever have bathed in scarce drinking water is absurd – just the sort of thing a dopey Independent reporter would believe! Since time immemorial, most would bathe in rivers or ponds, where such were available.

There is no evidence that climate change has made the slightest difference to any of this, or that similar problems did not occur in the past.

Even Independent readers seem to have realised this is a non-story, as there is only one comment on the article, which probably hits the nail on the head: