Every year over 2.8 million people die from AIDS.

Improved nutrition and food security reduces susceptibility to diseases, including HIV/AIDS.

Improved water supply and sanitation reduces susceptibility to and severity of HIV/AIDS and other major diseases.

Safe access to drinking water and basic sanitation eases the pressure by other infections on the immune system of HIV/AIDS sufferers and allows for better health.

Interactions between epidemiological status and human vulnerability to subsequent stresses and shocks are well documented. For example, rural populations affected by HIV/AIDS are less able to cope with the stress of drought. Likewise, individuals living with chronic or terminal diseases are more vulnerable to emergency situations.

The section “Did You Know…?” is taken from the 2^nd United Nations World Water Development Report: “Water, a shared responsibility”.

Water is used by industry in a myriad of ways: for cleaning, heating and cooling; for generating steam; for transporting dissolved substances or particulates; as a raw material; as a solvent; and as a constituent part of the product itself (e.g. in the beverage industry).

The water withdrawals for industry are:

·         World: 22% of total water use.

·         High-income countries: 59% of total water use.

·         Low-income countries: 8% of total water use.

Industries based on organic raw materials are the most significant contributors to the organic pollutant load with the food sector being the most important polluter. The contribution of the food sector to the production of organic water pollutant is:

·         High income countries: 40%

·         Low-income countries: 54%

In developing countries, 70% of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply.

The annual water volume used by industry will rise from 752 km≥/year in 1995 to an estimated 1,170 km≥/year in 2025.

In 2025, the industrial component is expected to represent about 24% of total freshwater withdrawal.

Of major concern are the situations in which the industrial discharge is returned directly into the water cycle without adequate treatment. If the water is contaminated with heavy metals, chemicals or particulates, or loaded with organic matter, this obviously affects the quality of the receiving water body or aquifer. The toxicity levels and lack of oxygen in the water can damage or completely destroy the aquatic ecosystems downstream as well as lakes and dams, ultimately affecting riverine estuaries and marine coastal environments.

Past mining activities caused heavy arsenic contamination of groundwater and topsoil over 40 km≥ in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Thailand. A study commissioned by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 2000 concluded that the contamination would last for the next 30 to 50 years. Testing of 1,000 samples showed arsenic contamination in some groundwater wells to be 50 to 100 times higher than the World Health Organization’s guideline value for drinking water (0.01 milligrams per litre).

In 1986 a fire destroyed a chemical store in Basel, Switzerland, near the borders of France and Germany. Chemicals reached the water in the Rhine River through the plant’s sewage system when huge amounts of water (10,000- 15,000 m3) were used to fight the fire. The store contained large quantities of 32 different chemicals, including insecticides and raw ingredients, and the water implications were identified through the presence of red dye in one of the substances, which turned the river red. The main wave of chemicals destroyed eels, fish and insects, as well as habitats for small animals on the riverbanks. The total eel population was destroyed for 500 kilometres downstream, from Basel in Switzerland down to Loreley in Germany. It took 3 months after the incident for the contaminant concentrations to drop to normal values.

Information from 2nd United Nations World Water Development Report ‘Water, a shared responsibility’, and from the ‘Water and Industry‘ facts and figures section of the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) website.

Water, sanitation and hygiene are three intertwined determinants of the water/ill-health/poverty spectrum, considering hygiene in its broadest sense, including environmental as well as personal hygiene.

A lack of adequate sanitation is the most critical determinant of contamination of drinking water with micro-organisms.

More than 2.6 billion people – 40% of the world’s population – lack basic sanitation facilities.

Over 1 billion people around the world still use unsafe drinking water sources.

The diseases and conditions of ill-health directly associated with water, sanitation and hygiene include infectious diarrhoea (which, in turn, includes cholera, salmonellosis, shigellosis, amoebiasis and a number of other protozoal and viral infections), typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, acute hepatitis A, acute hepatitis E and F, fluorosis, arsenicosis, legionellosis, methaemoglobinaemia, schistosomiasis, trachoma, intestinal helminth infections (including ascariasis, trichuriasis and hookworm infection), dracunculiasis, scabies, dengue, filariases (including lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis), malaria, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus infection, yellow fever and impetigo.

Globally, between 1,085,000 and 2,187,000 deaths due to diarrhoeal diseases can be attributed to the ‘water, sanitation and hygiene’ risk factor, 90% of them among children under five.

Improvements in safe water supply, and in particular in hygiene and sanitation, could reduce the incidence of diarrhoea by about 20% and the number of deaths due to diarrhoea by more than 50%.

The simple act of washing hands at critical times (after using the toilet and handling infant faeces, before handling and eating food) can reduce diarrhoeal episodes by 33%.

Meeting the sanitation target means that an average of 140 million people per year need to gain access to sanitation every year until 2015. Compared to the average of 85 million per year that gained access between 1990 and 2002, this poses a huge challenge to governments and the international community alike.

The section “Did You Know…?” is taken from the 1st World Water Development Report ‘Water for People, Water for Life’, UNICEF Sanitation Statistics website and UNICEF’s Water, environment and sanitation programme website.

It is estimated that some 30% of the world’s irrigated areas suffers from salinity problems and remediation is seen to be very costly.

Poor drainage and irrigation practices have led to water-logging and salinization of about 10% of the world’s irrigated lands, thereby reducing productivity.

There are significant areas of the globe where serious soil and groundwater salinization are present or have developed as a result of:

·         rising groundwater tables, associated with the introduction of inefficient irrigation with imported surface water in areas of inadequate natural drainage

·         natural salinity having been mobilized from the landscape, consequent upon vegetation clearing for farming development with increased rates of groundwater recharge

·         excessive disturbance of natural groundwater salinity through uncontrolled well construction and pumping.

Water-logging and salinization in large-scale irrigation projects are often the result of unavailable drainage infrastructure, which was not included in the engineering design in order to make projects look economically more attractive. These problems are generally associated with large-scale irrigation development under arid and semi-arid conditions, as in the Indus (Pakistan), the Tigris-Euphrates (Middle East) and the Nile (eastern Africa) river basins. The solutions to these problems are known, but their implementation is costly.

With population growth and concerns about water scarcity increasing, several countries, especially in the Middle East region, are developing desalination plants to convert saline water (e.g. sea-water, brackish water or treated wastewater) into freshwater.

The global market for desalination currently stands at about US $35 billion annually and could double over the next 15 years.

In 2002 there were about 12,500 desalination plants around the world in 120 countries. They produce some 14 million m²/day of freshwater, which is less than 1% of total world consumption.

The most important users of desalinated water are in the Middle East, (mainly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain), which uses about 70% of worldwide capacity; and in North Africa (mainly Libya and Algeria), which uses about 6% of worldwide capacity.

Among industrialized countries, the United States is one of the most important users of desalinated water (6.5%), especially in California and parts of Florida.

The section “Did You Know…?” is taken from the 1^st United Nations World Water Development Report: “Water for People, Water for Life” (WWDR1, 2003)