World Water Day highlights link between quality water, human health

The statistics on water quality's impact on human health speak for themselves: worldwide, 2.2 million people die each year due to diarrhea and other water-based diseases. The vast majority of those deaths are children who have not seen five birthdays. They die because the developing countries they live in are urbanizing faster than their governments can build adequate sewage treatment facilities. As a result, drinking water is contaminated and becomes a major threat to human health - rather than a factor contributing to it. They die because they live in rural farming communities that lack means to properly dispose of agricultural waste. And they die because their countries lack or ignore stringent environmental controls, and hazardous chemical and manufacturing waste are simply dumped into rivers.

So this year's theme for the United Nations' World Water Day, which will be celebrated March 22 in Kenya, is water quality. (Past themes have been trans-boundary waters, sanitation, and coping with water scarcity). Sufficient quality of water is critical to ensure a healthy environment and human health. According to the UN, the basic requirement per person per day is 20 to 40 liters of water free from harmful contaminants and pathogens for the purposes of drinking and sanitation. This rises to 50 liters when you factor in water for bathing and cooking. But the UN wants the rest of the world to know that in the most affected parts of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, and to a lesser extent Western Asia and Eurasia, water often isn't available in that quantity - much less quality.

Here's one thing that will be discussed in Kenya next week: According to the UN, providing safe water and sanitation to large parts of the human population remains a challenge. Today, 1.1 billion people around the world still lack access to improved water supply and more than 2.6 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. Improvements in sanitation in rural areas have lagged well behind urban areas, and there has been even a decline in the provision of sanitation services in rural areas of Oceania and the former Soviet Union.

This may seem unfathomable to those of us who live in cities or towns where we can take water quality for granted, with the occasional boil water notice when a main breaks. Some of us wrinkle our noses at the chlorinated smell that comes from the tap and rush to install filters on the tap. Others among us eschew the drinking of tap water at all and prefer to fill our landfills with the bottles we toss aside after drinking our fill. What really bothers me are the people who live in environments naturally hostile to the growth of lawns and yet who still ruin quality water by pouring it on their lawns, where it mixes with nitrogen fertilizer before running off into the aquifer. Is this you? Is this your neighbor? If so, the UN wants you to download the handy posters and fliers it provides and start tucking them under the windshield wipers of the cars on your block.

As the UN points out, there's not enough quality water to go around in the first place to ensure human health. Let's not ruin more.

Photo Credit: darkpatator