Water and Sanitation; What’s the score now?
Today’s blog continues of the theme of our water week and discusses the current situation with water and sanitation worldwide. There are some shocking figures, but also some positives that we shouldn’t forget! Don’t forget to sign the letter to Gordon Brown, you can do this using our Lancet Student Recommends section or you can go to the Medsin site and fill in the form online – it only takes 2 minutes, so please do sign! Also with relation to water check out this article on cholera among Congolese refugees and the spreading of cholera in the central provinces of Mozambique. The other thing I wanted to bring your attention to over the next few days is the Alma Mata Global Health Careers Day on November 30th, there’s limited places so hurry if you’re interested!
Picture courtesy of the WHO
Ensuring Environmental Sustainability is Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7 and it is in here that we find targets relation to water and sanitation; to halve by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
There are many different organisations taking an interest in this topic but today I’m going to concentrate on two reports to fill you in on the current situation. They are the MDG Report 2008 and the WHO and UNICEF’s Progress on Water and Sanitation Report 2008. For more information take a look at them, I’ve copied the links at the bottom of this blog.
I’m going to start with the positives: 1.6 billion people have gained access to drinking water since 1990 and 62% of the world’s population have access to improved sanitation which is an increase of 1.1 billion people since 1990. However, there is still a lot to be done and if the momentum is not increased the world will not achieve even half the MDG sanitation target by 2015.
Improving sanitation can save 1.5million children every year from dying due to diarrhoeal illnesses and can have a protective benefit to many more. 2.5 billion people lack access to sanitation and 1.2 billion have no facilities at all. Of these 2.5 billion, over 1 billion are in Asia and over half a billion in Africa.
Having good sanitation which ensures separation of waste from human contact is important as open defecation jeopardises the whole community resulting in increased cholera, worm infestations and hepatitis. A practice currently employed by 1.2billion people with nearly 25% of people in developing regions using no form of sanitation.
There is also a large rural-urban split in those benefiting from the increase in sanitation with urban sanitation coverage at 79% compared to rural being at 45%. Eight out of ten users of unimproved sanitation live in rural areas, showing the disparity in the way this goal is being addressed.
In terms of water 879 million people still don’t have access to safe drinking water. Sub Saharan Africa is home to a third of those without access to improved drinking water. Adding to this, 2.8billion people live in river basins with conditions of water scarcity and underdeveloped water infrastructure. There are also the 1.6 billion people who suffer economic water scarcity due to human, institutional or financial problems.
In 2006 there was improved access to water for 96% of urban populations and 78% of rural population again showing the rural urban divide in addressing water issues like sanitation. The 742 million rural people without access to improved drinking water need the effort to improve their access to be stepped up. The fact that urban dwellers have two times more access to piped water in their dwellings than rural people further highlights this disparity with only 30% of rural households having piped water.
I hope that these facts and figures have highlighted to you the importance of concentrating on water as issue for health and also the need for a real push to ensure that governments do not just address the needs of those easy to target when trying to achieve the MDG’s. Do keep checking the Lancet Student site this week for more information on water and please don’t forget to sign the letter to Gordon Brown.
(1) The Millennium Development Goals can be viewed at: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/gti.htm#goal7
(2) The Millennium Development Goals Report 2008 can be downloaded at: http://www.undp.org/publications/MDG_Report_2008_En.pdf
(3) The Progress on drinking water and sanitation report by UNICEF and WHO can be downloaded at: http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/monitoring/jmp2008.pdf