Red Cross Says Lack Of Clean Water, Sanitation Kill As Many As Tsunami

The chronic lack of clean water and sanitation in the developing world kills as many people as the Indian Ocean tsunami every month, the International Red Cross said in a new report.

More than 3 million people die annually from diseases spread through dirty water and poor sanitation facilities, but their plight rarely gets the same publicity s a single natural disaster, the International Red Crescent Societies said in a report. More than 1.1 billion people around the world lack safe water and a further 2.4 billion have no access to sanitation, the federation said.

Water-related illnesses account for about a third of common recurrent diseases around the world and cause lost working time when people fall sick or have to collect water from far away, explained Uli Jaspers, the federation’s water and sanitation chief. “The disease burden caused by contaminated water or unsafe waste disposal in many developing countries is unacceptably high,” Jaspers said. “You can see the destructive impact a lack of water and sanitation can have on economies and livelihoods.”

The humanitarian agency announced the launch of a 10-year plan to provide clean water and sanitation to the world’s poor. The Red Cross initiative will target the world’s poorest countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and parts of the Caribbean and Latin America. It will focus on long-term solutions, in line with a U.N. objective to reduce by half the number of people without clean water and sanitation by 2015. The program includes financial aid for the drilling of new wells, the modernization of existing water supplies and the building of more hygienic latrines. The federation estimated that the campaign will cost about $129 million over the next 10 years.

(Information from “U.S. Water News”, March, 2005, Vol. 22, No. 3.)