Saturday, October 16, 2010

Water: source of life

  1. Every week, 42,000 people die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
  2. Students in developing countries lose 443 million school days each year due to diseases associated with the lack of water, sanitation and hygiene. Repeated episodes of diarrhea and worm infestations diminish a child's ability to learn and impair cognitive development.
  3. More people have access to cell phones than to toilets. As a result, tons of untreated human waste make their way to water sources causing a litany of diseases, and even death.
  4. The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.
Many Haitians do not have access to potable drinking water but that can change.  If people back home stopped or cut back on buying bottled water and used a filtered water system (some are simple and inexpensive) and donated some of the money saved to groups like those below, water could be available to thousands more Haitians.

1 comment:

  1. Time Mag or Newsweek (I can't remember) this week has an article on the fight to control the world's water supply. You can probably find it online.

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