Huge strides in global water and sanitation: UN
Brazil confirms second case of atypical mad cow disease
GENEVA, May11, (Agencies): Global access to safer drinking water and decent sanitation has hugely improved over the past two decades but the world’s poorest often remain sidelined, the UN said Thursday.
Providing better drinking water and sanitation is the bedrock of the battle against diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, and typhoid.
“It’s really an issue of addressing excreta, faeces, poo, I can even say shit. This is the root cause of so many diseases,” said Bruce Gordon, coordinator of the water and sanitation arm of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Diarrhoea related to poor water, sanitation and hygiene kills 842,000 people every year, Gordon said.
In a report, the WHO and UNICEF said 89 percent of the globe’s population had access to improved water supplies at the end of 2012, up 13 percent on two decades ago.
In UN jargon, an “improved drinking water source” protects the supply from contamination, notably by faeces.
But despite the progress, 748 million people — roughly half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and most of the rest in Asia — still used unimproved water sources.
Population
The bulk of them lived in rural areas. The study also examined access to “improved sanitation facilities”, which separate excreta from human contact.
By the end of 2012, 64 percent of the global population used such facilities, a rise of 15 percentage points since 1990, it found.
Compounding the lack of access to decent sanitation, a billion people worldwide still defecate in the open air, including 600 million in India, the study found.
Open air defecation — which the report noted is a matter not only of poor sanitation but also of cultural acceptability — can all to easily undermine efforts to improve water supplies.
“It’s a matter of demand by the community. They all demand water, but not all of them demand sanitation. What is shocking is the picture of someone practising open defecation and on the other hand, having a mobile phone,” said Maria Neira, the WHO’s public health chief.
Vastly reducing the number of people without access to improved water and sanitation was one of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets set for 2015 by the international community at the turn of the century.
Also: SAO PAULO: Brazil has confirmed a second case of atypical mad cow disease, a year after several countries banned Brazilian beef imports when a similar case of the disease was confirmed.
The agriculture ministry said late Friday that a lab in Weybridge, England approved by the World Animal Health Organization confirmed it was a spontaneous case of atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, with no link to contaminated feed.