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Polluted Water Kills Millions Each Year

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Only about half the world’s population has piped water at home — and only a fraction of that is safe to drink.

Jamie Bartram is director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Barbara Wallace is director of corporate and foundation relations for the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following are excerpts from their “Water + Health = Life” in the IIP publication Global Water Issues.

Water’s importance for health has been recognized across cultures and millennia and remains as relevant in the 21st century as it was in ancient Rome, when Pliny the Elder observed: In aqua sanitas (In water there is health). According to the World Health Organization, if humankind would manage its water resources properly, ensure everyone has reliable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, and make basic hygiene practices the norm, we could save around 1.8 million lives yearly — mainly the lives of young children.

The list of diseases that we could prevent makes for impressive reading. Some of the world’s greatest ills are on the list, headed by diarrheal disease that kills more children than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Diarrheal diseases include the killer outbreak diseases like cholera, typhoid and dysentery. Diarrhea acts in a vicious circle with malnutrition, which leads to the deaths of many children already weakened by repeated episodes of diarrhea.

Other diseases on the list do not spring so readily to mind. Trachoma is the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness. It can be prevented through a simple regime of face washing and use of latrines, since the flies that transmit the Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria that cause the disease breed in human waste. Schistosomiasis, or bilharzia, is a parasitic disease that affects 200 million people worldwide, half of them in Africa. It is the second most socioeconomically devastating parasitic disease after malaria, but the schistosome parasite that transmits the disease requires human waste to pass into lakes (preventable through better sanitation), infection of certain species of snail (controllable by improved water resource management) and human infection by parasite larvae that burrow through immersed skin (preventable by minimizing contact with infected water when swimming, working in water or collecting water to take home). …

Did you know?

Only about half of the world’s households have piped water or a simple latrine or toilet.