AFP - 14 minutes ago
GENEVA (AFP) - - It is a subject that polite society might
prefer to avoid, but in the developing world, lack of access to
toilets is a serious issue that puts lives at stake, two UN
agencies said Thursday.
About two in every five people still have no access to a proper
toilet, said the World Health Organisation and the UN Childrens
Fund (UNICEF), warning that the lack of sanitation is putting 2.6
billion people at risk of disease.
"In the world today, there are 15 million deaths caused by
infectious diseases," said David Heyman, WHO's assistant director
general for health security and environment.
"If we had good sanitation today, and good water supplies, we
could decrease that immediately by two million -- those children
who are dying unnecessarily from diarrhoea diseases."
The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of
Sanitation, and it made use of International Water Day -- Thursday
-- to highlight the issue.
"People don't like to talk about sanitation," said Jon Lane,
executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative
Council, a UN-mandated organisation that works for better
sanitation in poor communities.
"It's a subject that is not spoken about in conventional polite
society -- and that's been a problem for a long time."
In a survey by the British Medical Journal of 11,000 health
professionals, sanitation was cited as the most important medical
advancement since 1840, ahead of vaccines and anaesthesia.
But Lane said that some governments approach the issue in the
wrong way.
"They've been using top-down, centralised, supply-driven,
subsidy-driven approach," he said. "They've been building toilets
for people who don't want them and use them as bicycle stores and
cow sheds and so forth."
Too much time was also being wasted on trying to get the private
sector involved in sanitation facilities.
"The big multinational companies who were perceived as coming
into the water sector don't want to come and manage utilities in
developing countries because they have a profit motive which cannot
be met in those countries," he said.
As a result, in Africa, six in 10 people have no access to what
development agencies call "an improved sanitation facility which
separates human waste from human contact".
Lack of sanitation not only increases the risk of disease, but
also gives rise to safety issues, particularly for women and
children who "risk sexual harassment and assault when defecating at
night and in secluded areas".
Between 1990 and 2004, sanitation access improved for 1.2
billion people. But if current trends continue, there will still be
2.4 billion people without toilets in 2015.
UN-Water chairman Pasquale Steduto said: "The entire UN system
has a shared responsibility in mobilizing concrete actions towards
its achievement; investments must increase immediately."
WHO estimates that, on average, one US dollar spent on
sanitation will wind up 9.10 dollars later.
In Peru, it cost 800 million dollars to respond to a cholera
outbreak in 1991 -- far more than the amount needed to improve
sanitation and thus prevent such an outbreak from occurring.
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