Tuesday, March 04, 2008 Not a drop to drink By Henrylito D. Tacio Health 101
ONE morning, nine-year-old Junjun woke up very early because he didn't want to be late in going to school. He went straight to the kitchen and drank water from the faucet. He then took a bath, wore his uniform, and went straight to the table to eat the food that his mother had prepared for him.
It was already at around 9 a.m. of the same day at school when Junjun complained of having a stomachache. His teacher noticed it, so she told him to go home.
Just a few blocks away, the boy did. His mother was surprised to see his son coming home very early. "What happened?" she asked.
The boy told her the reason and before completing his story, he ran directly to the comfort room. Junjun did it several times. The mother was worried, so she decided to bring her son to the nearby hospital. "Diarrhea, that's what hit your boy," the doctor told her.
Water-borne diseases like diarrhea are bound to stay in the Philippines, where water is becoming a scarce commodity.
In 24 provinces, one of every five residents quaffs water from dubious sources, the Philippine Human Development Report says.
These provinces are: Sulu, Maguindanao, Tawi-Tawi, Basilan, Masbate, Zamboanga del Norte and Sur, Negros Oriental and Occidental, Sultan Kudarat, Palawan, Camarines Norte, Leyte, Misamis Occidental, Apayao, Quezon, North Cotabato, Bukidnon, Iloilo, Guimaras, Agusan del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, Ilocos Norte and Benguet.
Today's "crisis in water and sanitation is - above all - a crisis of the poor," says the new United Nations Development Program study: 'Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Water Crisis.' "People living in the slums of Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai, and Nairobi face shortages of clean water," the UNDP study claims.
"(But) their neighbors in high income suburbs... keep their lawns green and swimming pools topped up. (The poor) pay five to ten times more for water per unit than those in high-income areas of their own cities."
Patchy research indicates that the poorest "spend more than 10% of their household income on water."
Dr. Klaus Toepfer, during his term as executive director of the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Program, said: "Unlike the energy crisis, the water crisis is life threatening. The level of suffering and misery represented by these statistics is almost beyond comprehension. And it is the children and women who suffer most."
"As many as 76 million people - mainly children - will die from preventable, water-related diseases by 2020 even if current United Nations goals are reached," said Dr. Peter H. Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security.
The UN has set a goal of 2015 for cutting in half the number of people who can't reach or afford safe drinking water. "It is a grave moral shortcoming that 1.2 billion people cannot drink water without courting disease or death," asserts 'The Last Oasis.'
Providing clean water can save most of the 1.8 million children who die yearly from diarrhea, the study claims. Installing a flush toilet in the home increases a child's chance by 59 percent of celebrating his or her birthday. In the Philippines, out of every 1,000 kids, 27 never make it to their first birthday.
In industrialized countries like Sweden or Japan, water-borne disease is a subject for history books. But in the Philippines and other countries in Asia, it involves hospital wards and morgues.
"All of these diseases are associated with our failure to provide clean water," deplored Dr. Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "I think it's terribly bleak, especially because we know what needs to be done to prevent these deaths. We're doing some of it, but the efforts that are being made are not aggressive enough."
"Whiskey's for drinkin'," Mark Twain once wrote. "But water is for fightin' over." For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com.
