In health terms however, the presence of rats has something to do with poor sanitation.
Coincidentally, the United Nations (UN) general Assembly declared the year 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation.
The UN goal for doing this is to raise awareness and to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.
Proper sanitation is a fundamental health concern. It is alarming therefore that at least 2.6 billion people -- about 41 percent of the global population -- do not have access to latrines or any sort of basic sanitation facilities.
As a result, millions suffer from a wide range of preventable illnesses, such as diarrhea, which claim thousands of lives each day, primarily young children.
Even in the Philippines, there are still areas which do not have basic sanitation facilities.
In this modern age, the primitive method of directly discharging waste into water bodies by people living along river banks is still practiced.
The UN cited several reasons why sanitation is important: 1) Sanitation is vital for human health. It is the most important medical advance since 1840. Improved sanitation reduces cholera, worms, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition, among other maladies, that cause disease and death in millions of people. Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation. That's 1.5 million preventable deaths each year.
2) Sanitation generates economic benefits: Improved sanitation has positive impacts on economic growth and poverty reduction. According to a recent WHO study, every dollar spent on improving sanitation generates an average economic benefit of US$7. The economic cost of inaction is astronomical. Without improving sanitation, none of the other Millennium Development Goals, to which the world has committed itself, will be achieved.
3) Sanitation contributes to dignity and social development: Sanitation enhances dignity, privacy and safety, especially for women and girls. It improves convenience and social status. Sanitation in schools enables children, especially girls reaching puberty, to remain in the educational system. Restricted toilet opportunities increase the chance of chronic constipation and are making women vulnerable to violence if they are forced to defecate during nightfall and in secluded areas. Providing improved sanitation facilities is a liberating development for women and girls and is providing substantial benefits for the whole community.
4) Sanitation helps the environment: Improved disposal of human waste protects the quality of drinking water sources. Re-use of composted waste for agriculture is an environmental, as well as economic, gain. At present, each year more than 200 million of human waste -- and vast quantities of waste water and solid waste -- go uncollected and untreated around the world, fouling the environment and exposing millions of people to disease and squalor. The UN says that improving sanitation is achievable. The technologies, approaches and skilled people are ready.
The estimated US$10 billion annual cost to halve the proportion of people without basic sanitation by 2015 (this is the sanitation MDG target) is modest and affordable. This sum is less than one percent of world military spending in 2005, one-third of the estimated global spending on bottled water, or about as much as Europeans spend on ice cream each year.
I hope the DOH and our local government units have lined-up programs this 2008 which are related to this UN declaration.
