• Each year around 1.8 million children die as a direct result of diarrhea and other diseases caused by the consumption of untreated water and inadequate sanitation. This equates to 4,900 deaths a day or population under 5 years of the cities of New York and London combined.

 

• Among the factors of disease and ill health directly related to water, sanitation and hygiene, including infectious diarrhea (cholera, salmonellosis, sigelosis, amebiasis and other viral and protozoan), typhoid and paratyphoid fever, acute hepatitis A, E and F, fluorosis, arsenicosis, legionnaire's disease, methemoglobinemia, schistosomiasis, trachoma, infections due to helminths (ascariasis, trichuriasis, hookworm), dracunculiasis, scabies, dengue, filariasis (lymphatic filariasis, and onchocerciasis), malaria, Japanese encephalitis, infection with West Nile virus, yellow fever and impetigo.

 

• The ill health associated with water shortages and sanitation affects productivity and economic growth, reinforcing inequalities that characterize the present model of globalization and confining in cycles of poverty vulnerable households

 

• Some 1,100 million people in developing countries do not have access to a minimum quantity of clean water. Coverage rates were lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, but the majority of people who lack clean water lived in Asia.

 

• Deprivation of sanitation is even more widespread. Some 2,600 million people (half the population of developing countries) lack access to basic sanitation. Coverage rates are surprisingly low in many less developed countries: only about 1 in 3 people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have access to sanitation (in Ethiopia, the figure is 1 in 7).

 

• The number of deaths from diarrhea in 2004 was about 6 times higher than the annual average mortality in armed conflict during the 90's.

• Water-related diseases generate loss of 443 million school days a year.

• Nearly half of the population of developing countries suffer at some point any health problems caused by lack of water and sanitation.

• Around 400 million people contract malaria every year. Since the proportion of malaria on the global burden of disease is steadily increasing, this is one of the most serious health problems worldwide and more urgent remedy.

• More than half the cases in the world, onchocerciasis (97%), malaria (88%), schistosomiasis (78%) and trachoma (52%) occur in Africa and more than half of the load Global dengue (62%) and lymphatic filariasis (56%) occur in the Southeast Asian region of the World Health Organization