Table of contents

Water for Health - Taking Charge
1. Water and health - two precious resources

The Health Connection - Water Management To Reduce Health Risks - Saving Sight - The Poverty Connection - Lost Opportunities

From outer space, the earth looks like a “blue” planet because most of its surface is covered by water. But only 2.5% of that water is fresh, and most of that lies frozen and inaccessible in the icecaps and Greenland, leaving less than 1% of fresh water accessible in lakes, river channels and underground.

Hydrologists estimate that the average annual flow of all the world's fresh water ranges from 35 000 Km3 to 50 000 Km3 . Due to a mix of geographical, environmental and financial factors, as well as to increased pollution from municipal and industrial waste, the leaching of fertilizers and pesticides used in agriculture, only about one-third of the world's potential fresh water can be used for human needs. As pollution increases, the amount of usable water decreases.

Water contributes much to health. Good health is the essence of development. However water's protective role is largely unseen and taken for granted in the wealthier countries. More attention is paid to it's role in disease transmission than health protection. Water contributes to health directly within households through food and nutrition, and indirectly as a means of maintaining a healthy, diverse environment. These two precious resources - water and health - together could enhance prospects for development.

Water & Development: The Health Connection

The poor are more susceptible to ill-health than are the well-off. They lack adequate supplies of safe water and safe methods of disposing of their wastes. Lack of water and sanitation create ideal conditions under which faecal oral diseases thrive.

Study after study has shown that where a community improves its water supply, hygiene and/or sanitation then health improves. For example, diarrhoea can be reduced by 26% when basic water, hygiene and sanitation are supplied. Yet statistics tell a terrible story. Forty percent of the world's 6 billion people have no acceptable means of sanitation, and more than 1 billion people draw their water from unsafe sources.

The World Health Organization says diarrhoeal diseases remain a leading cause of illness and death in the developing world. Every year, about 2.2 million people die from diarrhoea; 90% of these deaths are among children, mostly in developing countries. A significant number of deaths are due to a single type of bacteria, Shigella, which causes dysentery or bloody diarrhoea. It is readily controlled by improving hygiene, water supply and sanitation. Although no vaccine exists and antibiotics may be inaccessible to many people, an effective intervention is available. The simple act of washing hands with soap and water reduces Shigella and other types of diarrhoea by up to 35%.

Water Management To Reduce Health Risks

The transmission of disease is also rife among vulnerable communities because they live in environments receptive to the breeding of insect vectors that carry parasites such as malaria, filaria and trypanosomes. Most of these need water for part of their life-cycle. 300 million people suffer from malaria and in sub-Saharan Africa alone malaria kills an estimated 1 million people per year, the large majority are children under five. Other malaria hotspots are South and South-East Asia, and parts of South America.

Early diagnosis and treatment, as well as personal protection through the use of low-cost insecticide-treated mosquito nets continue to spearhead malaria control programmes. However, the ability to treat the disease effectively is being jeopardised as a result of growing problems of drug resistance and counterfeit drugs, while the use of mosquito nets meets with problems of affordability and social acceptability.

In many areas, particularly those with less intense transmission patterns, environmental management as part of integrated vector management can significantly reduce the spread of disease. Water management, which is key to this approach, should be based on a proper assessment and understanding of local vector ecology.

Many poor farmers in semi-arid areas may be dependent for their agricultural water supply on a small number of rich land-owners who can invest in the drilling of bore-holes. In the rice-growing areas of Tamil Nadu in southern India, such situations are not uncommon. Dependency on water provided by one rich farmer may create discrepancies between the time water can be purchased and the cropping cycle. Rice fields may thus be flooded for weeks and become important breeding places for Culex mosquitoes which can transmit Japanese encephalitis. Outbreaks of the disease kill at least 20% of people suffering clinical symptoms - mainly children. Twenty per cent of survivors are left with permanent damage to their central nervous system.

Growing water shortages for irrigation may contribute to the alleviation of the Japanese encephalitis problem. As farmers have to manage irrigation water as an increasingly scarce resource, the promotion of alternate wetting and drying practices of rice fields will contribute to a reduction in the vector population and, thus, in the risk of outbreaks.

In Bamako, the capital of Mali, poor people pay as much as 45 times more per unit of water than do the rich, who get water piped into their homes, often at subsidized prices. In 1988, Cairncross and Kinnear estimated that 25% of the population living in cities in developing countries bought water from vendors, typically spending 10%-20% of household income.

Saving Sight

Trachoma can be prevented by improving sanitation, reducing the breeding sites of flies and teaching children to wash their faces with clean water. Trachoma caused by microscopic Chlamydia trachomatis remains the leading cause of preventable blindness - with an estimated 6 million people suffering loss of sight and 146 million acute cases worldwide.

Water & Health: The Poverty Connection

Poor health and illness are dreaded by almost everyone. Needy people tend to live on what they earn on a daily basis and have no cash reserves to pay for a sudden illness. The loss of income and the inability to pay for the cost of treatment can push a family further into poverty and debt, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

“If you don't have money today, your disease will take you to your grave.”

Poor communities are often forced to over exploit their natural resources in order to survive. Water sources are particularly vulnerable. In too many cases, they are abused to such an extent that they no longer can provide for a community's basic needs and end up posing serious health risks. However, opportunities for reversing this situation exist. What is required is that priority is given to water management and development and that communities play a major role in solving their own problem. This will entail the full involvement of communities in the planning and development of their own water systems.

Almost 70% of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty are women. Women - especially poor women - are often trapped in a cycle of ill-health exacerbated by childbearing and hard physical labour

Eliza Fenlas, a mother of three who lives in Inhambane, one of Mozambique's driest provinces, spends five hours a day trekking 24 kilometres to fetch 20 litres of water. She looks forward with joy and anticipation to the day when her area will benefit from a safe water programme. She says a well nearby will make a big difference in her life. She will have more time for household chores and farming. She will have more water available for washing. She is hopeful that the safe water will put an end to her seven-year-old son's chronic diarrhoea. Source: UNICEF

The right to the highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental human right which embraces a wide range of socio-economic factors that promote conditions in which people can lead a healthy life, and extends to the underlying determinants of health, such as access to safe and potable water and adequate sanitation, and a healthy environment

Gross inequities in the reliability and quality of water supply services create a market for water-vendors and encourage use of unsafe local wells and springs in urban slums.

Similar inequities in access to safe water, especially in rural areas, force women in developing countries to spend hours every day fetching water, causing an enormous drain on their energy, productive potential and health. The lack of good quality, reliable water puts people's health at risk and may force them to extract water from alternative, unsafe sources, exposing them to diseases such as diarrhoea or dysentery, cholera, typhoid and schistosomiasis. Traditional wells may become polluted with agrochemical residues as irrigated agriculture intensifies

The gap between rich and poor becomes all too apparent in regard to the lack of water for drinking, irrigation and sanitation, and in their inability to maintain the integrity of ecosystems on which people depend. Time and again, poor people everywhere - in Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, etc.- cite lack of safe drinking-water as one of their most important problems. Good water, good health and better living are worthy goals in and of themselves. But, basic services for the needy are also a moral and human-rights obligation. This view is too often overlooked by those in control of the developmental purse-strings and by the poor themselves. Because deprived people are frequently unaware that they have a right to properly functioning basic services - to good water and to good health - they have been unable to obtain them.

Lost Opportunities

Where women and children spend hours each day walking to streams and other sources to collect water for their families, they have little time or energy left to pursue an education and other gainful activities. The heavy loads they carry may cause skeletal deformation and accelerate the deterioration of joints.

Everyone benefits from good sanitation. But girls are among those who benefit the most. Girls often miss out on an education because they have to help with the household chores and, when money is scarce, it's usually the boys who get chosen to go to school. An important reason why girls drop out of school in developing countries - mainly in Africa and Asia - is because of lack of sanitation facilities.

Studies show that school attendance by girls increases when separate latrines for girls and boys are installed. In a school in Bangladesh, where UNICEF began promoting separate facilities in 1992, girls’ school attendance has risen by an average of 11% a year.

The unreliability of rural water supplies in parts of India stimulated people to store water in their houses to bridge periods when the supply ran dry. This resulted in dengue out-breaks, because the stored water provided breeding places for Aedes mosquitoes.

Good water supply, sanitation, hygiene and water management contribute to preventing: Anaemia, Arsenicosis, Ascariasis, Campylobacteriosis, Cholera, Cyanobacterial poisoning, Dengue, Diarrhoea, Dysentery, Fluorosis, Guinea-worm disease, Japanese encephalitis, Infectious hepatitis, Impetigo, Lead poisoning, Malaria, Malnutrition, Methaemoglobinaemia, Ringworm (Tinea), Scabies, Schistosomiasis, Trachoma and Typhoid

Nutrition, food security and irrigation Malnutrition affects nearly 20% or almost 800 million in the developing world (WHO 2000). Malnutrition plays a major role in their ill-health, making them particularly susceptible to infectious diseases carried by unsafe food and water, which results in further malnutrition. Great progress has been made in feeding the world. Over the past 30 years, food production and distribution have more or less kept up with the growing population. The two factors responsible for this improvement are irrigation and high-yielding varieties of crops. Food production needs to increase further to feed a growing world population; while famine, owing in part to water shortage, is already affecting large parts of the world (particularly Africa). 40% of the world's food now comes from irrigated land and this requires ample supplies of water. For example, 1 000 tons of water are needed to grow one ton of wheat. Solutions include more efficient use of water, recycling and sustainable use of dams and irrigation systems.

2. Why we need to act