Lack of water and sanitation killing thousands everyday
On Wednesday Finance minister Trevor Manuel committed R1,7-billion of the 2005 Budget towards municipal and sanitation infrastructure. Cholera epidemics have in the past been a reminder that many South Africans, mostly in rural areas and informal settlements hugging the cities, still don’t have access to safe water and sanitation.
Dr Jamie Bartram, co-ordinator for the World Health Organisation’s Water, Sanitation and Health Programme recommends the dramatic scaling up of efforts, involving the expansion of safe drinking water and sanitation coverage in order to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) water and sanitation target by 2015.
Bartram’s article in The Lancet is the fifth in a series of papers summarizing the key conclusions of the Millennium Project ‘ a three-year independent advisory effort commissioned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to review progress of the MDG.
The MDG’s commit the international community to address extreme poverty, with quantitative, measurable targets set for 2015.
Bartram and colleagues write that poor sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water is a ‘silent humanitarian crisis’ that kills some 3 900 children everyday and thwarts progress to the MDG’s, especially in Africa and Asia.
The paper warns that while sufficient progress has been made to reach the overall target of halving the proportion of the population without access to safe drinking water between 1990 and 2015, meeting this target will still leave hundreds of millions of people without safe drinking water, particularly in east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Bartram reveals that sanitation coverage rates are barely keeping pace with population growth while four out of ten people in the world do not have access to a simple pit latrine.
The author states that although access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation can have a strong positive effect on human health, the development and management of water resources as a whole has significant health implications.
Man-made reservoirs and irrigation schemes help provide food and nutrition, but they can also form ideal habitats for intensified transmission of schistosomiasis, an infection caused by a type of flatworm.
Irrigation infrastructure and management of irrigation can be designed to keep transmission to a minimum.
Improving irrigation to avoid standing or slow-moving water and improving disposal of household wastewater can also reduce mosquito breeding and transmission of malaria.
The authors are quick to add that this requires neither colossal sums of money nor scientific breakthroughs or technological advances.
Author
-
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Lack of water and sanitation killing thousands everyday
by healthe, Health-e News
February 24, 2005