Water Sanitation and Hygiene: Taking Action Clean water is one the basic needs for human life, but in places around the world like Sub-Saharan Africa, sources of clean water are scarce. There are many places across Sub-Saharan Africa that are lacking in this basic human need or have an abundance of unsafe water. These citizens of other countries around the world, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa, are deprived of safe water used for drinking, preparing food, infrastructure like toilets and sinks, and providing safe healthcare. Because clean water is one of the basic needs for human life, Africans who do not have access to clean water sources struggle every day. Water sustains human life and is necessary for the health of human beings and …show more content…
According to the United Nations, water scarcity affects more than 40% of the global population and is projected to continue to rise (United Nations, 2017). It is also estimated that 1.8 billion people use water that is fecally contaminated. Those people, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the lowest levels of access to drinking water and sanitation around the world, with about 32% of the population still without an improved water source and 102 million people still using surface water (Roche, 2017). Individuals, globally, with a lack of safe water to drink, about 2.4 billion of them also lack proper sanitation services (United Nations, 2017). About 695 million of those lacking proper sanitation services, live in Sub-Saharan Africa (Roche, …show more content…
This resulted in the use of contaminated water with disease, and using it on patients would increase the spread of Ebola. Healthcare facilities are supposed to be places that help heal the sick or injured, not put them in fear or make illnesses worse. In order to treat patients to improve their health, there must be a source of water that is safe and clean. Diarrheal diseases, like cholera, are most common in negatively affecting children under the age of five. In order to prevent these diarrheal diseases, interventions through safe drinking water, improved sanitation and washing hands with soap are necessary. By treating these diseases in a healthcare facility with clean and safe water would decrease the number of deaths affected by diarrheal diseases (Goldberg,
... that train and educate people about certain diseases. Through education, citizens will know how to respond on special scenario, such as in the case of being infected with Typhoid fever, even without the immediate assistance from healthcare representatives. Likewise, people will know the signs of Typhoid fever which will help them know the important steps to avoid the worsening of their conditions. Further, the availability of emergency health providers will help in preventing the worsening of health conditions if in any case, contamination has already occurred. Also, the local government agencies that monitor the water lines are a big help in preventing bioterrorism on water supplies. If these agencies will miss cleaning the pipelines or the water itself, there’s a big chance for bioterrorism to take place. Thus, local agencies should be consistent with their jobs.
The focus of health care is and has always been, practicing good hygiene, living a healthy lifestyle, and having a positive attitude reduces the chance of getting ill. Although there is not much prevention we can take for some of the diseases but we can certainly practice good hand hygiene to prevent infection and its ill effects. Research proves that hand washing is surely the most easy and effective way to prevent infection in health care. The question for this research: Is Hand washing an effective way to prevent infection in health care? It led to the conclusion that due to the high acuity, high patient: staff ratio, and lack of re evaluation certain units in the health care facilities cannot adhere to correct hand washing guidelines. Hand
During the event of a communicable disease outbreak, as a human services administrator, I would take all of the necessary steps to communicate to youths, parents and medical staff in a timely and efficient manner. My priority would be to isolate the disease as much as possible and to assist those that have been infected with getting the treatment that they need (Graham-Clay, 2005). In the event that there is an outbreak of a disease such as E-coli within a local high school, I would begin by notifying the medical staff immediately. Considering the fact that Ecoli is a food borne illness, it is considered to be a public health crisis and should be handled as such. There are three recognized phases of a crisis: prevention, preparedness, and recovery. Each of these phases requires planned communication strategies. An outbreak often creates a high-emotion, low-trust situation (Heymann, 2004).
In the ancient world there was an awareness of the need for sanitation and for water that was safe for consumption. Efforts at keeping water pure, maintaining access to waters of high quality, and providing sewage disposal were widely practiced. With the diminish of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the middle ages, these practices were largely forgotten, and infectious illnesses became common. Only with the ascendancy of the scientific method and discoveries in the last one hundred years has the connection between water quality, sanitation, and health once again been discovered.
Furthermore, more lives could be lost due to the spreading of diseases. With such extreme lacks of sanitation, clean water...
It’s no mystery that having clean water is a fundamental element to living in a prosperous society and one of the few things essential for human survival. Water not only sustains our health, but is required in making everything from electronics to clothes. Clean water may seem as ordinary as putting on your shoes, but it’s a daily party of our life that’s being threatened.
Measures to expand and improve public delivery systems of drinking water, contributing to a reduction in morbidity and mortality associated with enteric diseases, because these diseases are associated directly or indirectly with providing substandard water or poor provision water. Currently, 1,400 million people lack access to safe drinking water and nearly 4,000 billion lack adequate sanitation. According to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), 80% of diseases are transmitted through contaminated water.
Many people grab a water bottle to go as they head to life as normal, others in developing countries spend their lives searching for water that is rarely found. Even if they do obtain water, it is seldom clean and usually comes with the risk of disease. As more developed countries pay a dollar or so for a bottle of water, others in less fortunate places worship water as if it is gold. As many children around the world attend a privileged school everyday, the idea of missing school due to water-borne illness never crosses their mind, yet for those in less fortunate countries, it is a gift to have the strength and health to attend school on a regular basis.
Clean water is needed for good human and animal health, but as DoSomething.org states, over 1 billion people worldwide don’t have a means of getting clean drinking water, an...
Another problem for people of Africa is clear access to clean water. Clean drinking water is very rare for the people of Africa. Unclean water and sanitation problem leads to many diseases in African countries. Main problem which occurs due to unclean water is child morality. Around 2000 children’s die from diarrhoea which spread due to poor sanitatio...
Approximately 844 million people (one tenth of the population) in the world do not have access to clean and 2.3 billion do not have access to a decent toilet. This poor sanitation and contaminated water quality is the cause of death for over 289 000 children under the age of 5 every year.
Having clean water to drink means that water must have microbial, chemical and physical characteristics that meet WHO guidelines or national standards on drinking water quality. Around 780 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water (Millions Lack Safe Water). More than 3.4 million people die each year from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related causes. Nearly all deaths, 99 percent, occur in developing countries. Around the world, diseases in unclean water kill about 1,400 children every day (Clean Drinking Water). There are many organizations that raise money in order to help develop ways or create ways for people to obtain clean drinking water. However, many people are unaware that this is even a problem in other countries because we take clean water for granted.
The combination of safe drinking water and hygienic sanitation facilities is a precondition for health and for success in the fight against poverty, hunger, child deaths and gender inequality. UNICEF works in more than 90 countries around the world to improve water supplies and sanitation facilities in schools and communities, and to promote safe hygiene practices. All UNICEF water and sanitation programmes are designed to contribute to the Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation: to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water and basic sanitation. Key strategies for meeting the water, sanitation and hygiene challenges are to:
Some individuals don’t appreciate the advantage of having clean water available at all times. Habitants of developed countries who have easy access to clean drinkable water directly from a hose, tap water from the kitchen faucet or from bathrooms in their homes, usually don’t care or worry about saving it. Habitants of rural poor communities such as Sub-Saharan Africa, are living in a water stressed environment. Residents of these communities have to walk miles at a time just to gather water from streams and ponds, even though the water source may contain water-borne disease that can make them very sick. In the rural areas that don’t have access to safe, clean water, it is very difficult to prevent the spread of viruses.
In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference. South Africa, one of the most advanced countries in Africa, with a thriving economy based on technology and agriculture, is currently facing a downward slope in terms of water availability.