Moldova is placed on the 69th spot among 122 most representative countries around the world regarding the quality of drinking water, said scientist Constantin Moraru, from the Institute of Geography and Geology of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences.

Moraru said at a seminar on Wednesday that despite the location between three rivers - Dniestr, Proute and Danube - the quality of drinking water in Moldova is worse than in Romania and Ukraine.

"Bad drinking water represents a factor of risk for the Moldovan population, in particular, for rural people, because they consume water from wells with too many nitrates. The situation is not better in Chisinau where the water cleaning station uses half of its capacity due to its outdated equipment," Moraru stressed.

Earlier, environmentalists signalled that about 70 percent of wells and other sources in Moldova contain nitrates, while water sources in the suburbs of Chisinau contain 90 percent of nitrates. According to environmentalists, breeding farms from rural settlements represent a major source of pollution. Water pipes need renovation and the rural regions must be supplied with drinking water from wells controlled by the state in order to improve this situation, environmental organisations say.

Data from the Ecologist Movement show that 50.3 percent of residents from settlements where the wells contain nitrates suffer from chronic diseases of liver compared with 8.1 percent in the regions with a normal concentration of nitrates. Thirty-three percent of teenagers from polluted regions suffer from delayed biological development, and their number accounts to 9.7 percent in areas with a normal ecologic state.