World water situation "unacceptable," says UN health agency

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Mon Mar 21,12:13 PM ET Science - AFP

World water situation "unacceptable," says UN health agency

Mon Mar 21,12:13 PM ET Science - AFP

GENEVA (AFP) - The head of the World Health Organization (news - web sites) said the lack of clean drinking water in much of the world, with its accompanying pandemic of diarrhoeal diseases constituted "an unacceptable situation."

WHO Director-General Lee Jong-Wook said an estimated 30,000 people, most of them children, die of such diseases every week.

"People who can turn on a tap and have safe and clean water to drink, to cook with and to bathe in often take it for granted, and yet more than one billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water," Lee said.

"Every week, diarrhoeal disease due to easily preventable causes claims the lives of 30 000 people, most of them young children. This is a silent humanitarian crisis that thwarts progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)," he said.

The goals, adopted at a global UN summit in 2000 included a pledge to halve the number of people with no access to clean drinking water, currently estimated at about 1.1 billion, by 2015. Two years later, a world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg added a commitment to halve the number of people -- some 2.4 billion -- who have no basic sanitation.

Little progress has been made on either promise.

"The humanitarian case for action is clear," Lee said.

"The economic case is just as strong," he added. "It has been estimated that an additional investment of around 11.3 billion dollars (8.6 billion euros) per year over and above current spending could result in a total economic benefit of 84 billion dollars annually."

Lee said the right approaches had been developed and were in use, "but there is not enough involvement or commitment by governments, by the private sector, by nongovernmental organizations or by communities."