Providing a case of bottled water as the main source of drinking water for a nation, this article looks at the unfolding of this development in Mexico and locates it into the mainstream debate about how to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) Target 6.1: universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all. This is timely and relevant due to the 2017 amplification of the indicators defining access to improved sources of water to include the use of bottled water, under the broader category of “packaged water.” This signifies that populations that rely on bottled water as a complement to tap water, independent of the frequency and quality of this service, will be considered to have achieved the target. In only two decades, the phenomenon of bottled water has grown from a high‐end, niche consumer good to a global industry valued at $170 billion and climbing. The industry now stands poised to show how the private sector can be involved in achieving global targets, such as SDG 6.1, while earning large profits. In Mexico, 2017 estimates show 73% of the national population relies on bottled water as their unique source of drinking water, up from 61% in 2010. The article will trace the industry's history in Mexico rising out of an earthquake, a cholera epidemic, a financial crisis and the actions of the bottled water corporations. The profitability of this particular model of water delivery has attracted large‐scale investment by multinational food and beverage corporations and banks as well a recent explosion of small‐scale neighborhood water shops selling relatively small quantities of water. Today, this Mexican model is actively being replicated in other regions. Using a literature review and interviews with key informants from CONAGUA, Mexico's national water commission, the article traces four “lines of flight” of the origin and development of the bottled water industry in Mexico. The article reviews the current expansion of market actors and the published strategies of the dominant multinational corporations, to show the various configurations of the bottled water industry that are competing for the future of water delivery. The paper concludes by suggesting that the consequences of this trend deserve renewed examination by the water research community. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance

A major feature of an adaptive immune system is its ability to generate B- and T-cell clones capable of recognizing and neutralizing specific antigens. These clones recognize antigens with the help of the surface molecules, called antigen receptors, acquired individually during the clonal development process. In order to ensure a response to a broad range of antigens, the number of different receptor molecules is extremely large, resulting in a huge clonal diversity of both B- and T-cell receptor populations and making their experimental comparisons statistically challenging. To facilitate such comparisons, we propose a flexible parametric model of multivariate count data and illustrate its use in a simultaneous analysis of multiple antigen receptor populations derived from mammalian T-cells. The model relies on a representation of the observed receptor counts as a multivariate Poisson abundance mixture (m PAM). A Bayesian parameter fitting procedure is proposed, based on the complete posterior likelihood, rather than the conditional one used typically in similar settings. The new procedure is shown to be considerably more efficient than its conditional counterpart (as measured by the Fisher information) in the regions of m PAM parameter space relevant to model T-cell data.

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This article uses an integrated social reproduction theory (SRT) framework to highlight the interrelation between all non‐wage forms of survival, such as debt, community and the environment. The analysis demonstrates how Mexico's unregulated industrialization and social housing policies have created new forms of poverty and market dependency. The article relies on a comprehensive literature review and extensive fieldwork carried out in El Salto, one of Mexico's industrial peripheries, and shows how vulnerable populations become trapped, in this case on the banks of the Río Santiago, one of Mexico's most contaminated rivers. Parallel developments of industrial and housing policies contextualize the conditions unfolding throughout Mexico where populations are relocated to areas without adequate water and where drinking water is supplied by bottled water companies. This contribution highlights why an expanded SRT framework is valuable for understanding the relationship between ecological dispossession and the forced reliance on markets and debt.

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