Clean water, toilets could save 700,000 children a year
LONDON: They are the foundations of a happy, healthy childhood: Good nutrition, health care which includes immunisations and preventative care as well as treatment for illness, a good education.
How many among us would even think to list clean water to drink, a safe place to go to the toilet and the ability to keep hands, bodies and surroundings clean with soap and water?
Yet far too many children are deprived of these, affecting their health, education and life chances.
Some 480,000 children under five die each year of diarrhoea, more than half of these directly linked to poor water, sanitation and hygiene.
And 880,000 children under five die each year of pneumonia – which also has links to dirty water, poor sanitation and poor hygiene.
The solutions are familiar, and close to home. New research by WaterAid and PATH’s Defeat DD initiative has found that combining clean water, decent household toilets and good hygiene with routine childhood vaccinations and nutrition support could potentially save the lives of nearly 700,000 young children and prevent billions of harmful bouts of diarrhoeal illness and pneumonia in under-fives each year.
Produced by WaterAid and PATH’s Defeat Diarrheal Disease ( Defeat DD) Initiative, this new analysis is published in the report Coordinate, Integrate, Invest: how joint child health and water, sanitation and hygiene ( WASH) interventions can deliver for your country’s future.
Our modelling shows that if every child in the world had access to clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene including handwashing with soap, along with routine rotavirus immunisation and
Some 480,000 children under five die each year of diarrhoea, more than half of these directly linked to poor water, sanitation and hygiene.
other nutritional interventions such as zinc supplementation and breastfeeding, we could cut the rate of deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea by half, and reduce incidences of diarrhoea and pneumonia by two-thirds.
That is millions of episodes of illness. Imagine what that would mean for these young children, their parents, and the impact on the health care system.
Esther breastfeeding her youngest daughter, Tendry, inside her house in Amberomena village.
Belavabary commune, Madagascar. She said: “My kids get diarrhoea often and during the rainy season, there is a case almost every day. I know that some of our sicknesses are caused by the dirty water we drink. “We try to avoid going to the doctor because we don’t have money to pay them. — IPS