Every year 100 million holiday-makers are drawn to the Mediterranean. With one third of the world's tourist trade, it is the most popular of all the holiday destinations: it is also the most polluted.
It has only 1 percent of the world's sea surface, but carries more than half the oil and tar floating on the waters. Thousands of factories pour their poison into the Mediterranean, and almost every city, town and village on the coast sluices its sewage, untreated, into the sea.
The result is that the Mediterranean, which nurtured so many civilizations, is gravely ill-the first of the seas to fall victim to the abilities and attitudes that evolved around it. And the population does not merely stifle the life of the sea-it threatens the people who inhabit and visit its shores.
Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, polio, viral hepatitis and food poisoning are endemic in the area, and there are periodic outbreaks of cholera.
The mournful litany of disease is caused by sewage. Eight-five percent of the waste from the Mediterranean's 120 coastal cities is pushed out into the waters where their people and visitors bathe and fish. What is more, most cities just drop it in straight off the beach; rare indeed are the places like Cannes and Tel Aviv which pipe it even half a mile offshore.
Less than 100, 000 of Greece's four million coastal people have their sewage properly treated-and Greece, is one of the cleaner countries of the northern shore.
The worst parts of the sea are Israeli/Lebanon coast and between Barcelona and Genoa, which flushes out over 200 tons of sewage each year for every mile of its length.
Not surprisingly, vast areas of the shallows are awash with bacteria and it doesn't take long for these to reach people. Professor William Brumfit of the Royal Free Hospital once calculated that anyone who goes for a swim in the Mediterranean has a one in seven chance of getting some sort of disease. Other scientists say this is an overestimate; but almost all of them agree that bathers are at risk.
An even greater danger lurks in the seductive seafood dishes that add so much interest to holiday menu. Shellfish are prime carriers of many of the most vicious diseases of the area. They often grow amid pollution. And even if they don't they are frequently infected by the popular practice of "freshening them up" throwing filthy water over them in markets.
Industry adds its own poisons. Factories cluster round the coastline, and even the most modern rarely has proper waste-treatment plant. They do as much damage to the sea as sewage. Fifteen thousand factories foul the Italian Lihurian Riviera. Sixty thousand pollute the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia, Sicily and the west Italian coast! The lagoon of Venice alone receives the effluents of 76 factories.
Thousands of tons of pesticides are blown off the fields into the sea, detergents from millions of sinks kill fish, and fertilizers, flushed out to sea, nourish explosions of plankton which cover bathers with itchy slime.
Then there is the oil—130,000 tons pouring each year from ships, 115,000 tons more from industries round the shore. Recent studies show that the Mediterranean is four times as polluted as the north Atlantic, 20 times as bad as the north-east Pacific.
Apart from the nine-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is landlocked, virtually unable to cleanse itself. It takes 80 years for the water to be renewed, through the narrow, shallow straits, far too slow a process to cope with the remorseless rush of pollution.
According to the passage, the Mediterranean______.
A．accounts for one-third of the world's tourist population
B．is the most polluted area on earth
C．has only 1 percent of the world's surface
D．is the most polluted sea in the world
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