Jul 13, 2008
Millions of people die every year from preventable causes related to unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient hygiene. Most of them are children under five. They die by contracting diarrhoea (1.5 million deaths each year), through malnutrition (860,000 deaths), and a variety of others ailments and afflictions such as intestinal infections. It is estimated that improving water, sanitation, and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of the disease burden of the world.

This report, from the World Health Organization, entitled “Safer Water, Better Health: Costs, Benefits and Sustainability of Interventions to Protect and Promote Health,” contains an especially interesting section on the benefit-cost ratio—how much benefit the world will realize from how much cost. Providing universal access to improved water and improved sanitation and water disinfected at the point of use by 2015 would result in annual benefits of over $344 billion, at a benefit-cost ratio of 12 to 1. One trillion dollars every three years for one-twelfth the cost—now that's a benefit. What are we waiting for?
tags: Water | Health

Read the Abstract and Download the Report