The Global Water Crisis

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water crisis

Unclean water threatens health of one million Central Africans, UN warns

20 March 2008 – Up to one million Central Africans do not have access to clean water and therefore are highly vulnerable to threat of deadly waterborne diseases because of the conflict threatening their country, United Nations relief agencies reported today.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian

Affairs (OCHA) said the situation was worst in the northeast of the Central African Republic (CAR), where fighting between Government forces and rebels and attacks by local bandits have forced thousands of people out of their villages to seek shelter in the nearby bush.

The insecurity is so widespread across the north of the country that many Central Africans there are too afraid to return to their villages, instead resorting to stagnant pools or rivers in the bush areas for their water supplies. Those that have remained in their villages often face wells that are not working.
(Full Article)

Water different world: from Kent to Cambodia

Every 20 seconds worldwide, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation. That’s 1.5 million preventable deaths each year.
In Cambodia, the British Red Cross has helped more than 60,000 people to have cleaner water and sanitation over the past five years. Some 11 per cent of children in the rural province of Oddar Meanchey die before the

age of five. The British Red Cross has been working in schools in the area to provide safe, clean water in the classroom

The main dangers from water here are diarrhoea and skin diseases
- Viey Savet (12) from Cambodia

(Full Article)

Follow the link below to a Dec 18, 2007 CNN article about safe water. An excerpt from the article:

According to the World Bank, 88 percent of all diseases are caused by unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
Annually, water-related problems are responsible for:

4 billion cases of diarrhea, resulting in the deaths of more than 6 million children.
300 million malaria sufferers;
200 million schistosomiasis sufferers;
6 million people who have been struck blind by trachoma;
and 500 million people who are currently at risk of contracting it, the World Bank says.

The U.N. also suggests that unsanitary water is to thank for 1.5 million cases of hepatitis A (and 133 million cases of intestinal worms).

At any one point in time, 50 percent of all people in the developing world will be in hospital suffering from one or more water-related diseases. Most will be children, water-related diseases being the second biggest killer of children worldwide (after acute respiratory diseases like Tuberculosis), according to Water Aid. (Diarrhea alone has killed more children in 10 years than all the people killed in wartime since World War 2, according to UNICEF).

- CNN (Full Article)

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