Investing in public health
Basic hygiene should be among the basic lessons provided in grade school. But how can children follow their hygiene lessons when they lack access to toilets and running water in their own home?
The World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund reported recently that more than seven million Filipinos do not have toilets at home and defecate anywhere, with an estimated 570,000 using buckets and open-pit latrines.
The WHO and Unicef, in their report on countries’ progress in achieving Millennium Development Goals for sanitation and drinking water, also found that about 2.3 million Filipinos still get untreated surface water from dams, canals and rivers, while another 6.1 million get water that is not filtered or treated from wells and springs.
Health experts have stressed that many diseases can be prevented and overall health improved, especially among children, merely through regular hand washing with soap and water. For those with no access to tap water in their own homes, this is not a simple activity. Even public schools in some urban centers lack running water in their toilets.
Providing sanitary toilets to impoverished communities has been a problem for decades. A corruption scandal over “toilet communities” during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos highlighted the problem. The WHO and Unicef report shows that three decades later, there’s still a lot of work ahead in giving millions of Filipinos access to proper sanitation and water facilities.
Officials say that since 1990, about 40 million Filipinos have gained access to clean water and toilets. But family ownership of mobile phones is higher than the number of toilets per household, according to a lawmaker who is seeking higher appropriation for building public bathrooms, toilets and facilities for clean water.
With state health coverage continuing to expand, providing access to sanitation and clean water can translate into huge savings in public health care costs. This is on top of the fact that health is truly wealth: healthy people are more productive and contribute to nation building. Investing in a nation’s human capital always has guaranteed returns.