Sanitation is vital for health

Readers of a prestigious medical journal were recently asked to name the greatest medical advance in the last century and a half. The result: better sanitation. In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, diarrhoea, cholera, and typhoid spread through poor sanitation was the leading cause of childhood illness and death; today, such deaths are rare in these regions. In developing countries, however, they are all too common, and recent research suggests that poor sanitation and hygiene are either the chief or the underlying cause in over half of the annual 10 million child deaths. Compelling, evidence-based analysis shows that hygiene and sanitation are among the most cost-effective public health interventions to reduce childhood mortality. Access to a toilet alone can reduce child diarrhoeal deaths by over 30 percent, and hand-washing by more than 40 percent.

Diarrhoeal diseases

Five thousand children die every day due to infectious diarrhoea, which is caused primarily by inadequate sanitation. Seventeen percent of under-five deaths are attributable to diarrhoeal diseases, making it the second largest killer of children, after pneumonia. Diarrhoea is also a major contributor to malnutrition and stunting.

Diarrhoeal diseases are often described as water-related, but more accurately should be known as excreta-related since the pathogens derive from faecal matter. The faecal-oral cycle« describes the principal routes of transmission of infectious diarrhoeal disease. This cycle is fuelled by the ive f’s fluid (drinking contaminated water); fields (the contamination of soil and crops with human faecal matter); fingers (unwashed hands preparing food or going into the mouth); food (eating contaminated food); and flies (spreading disease from faeces to food and water or directly to people – particularly problematic where open-air defecation is the norm).

Breaking the faecal-oral cycle, which depends primarily upon hand-washing and use of toilets or latrines that contain and sanitise faecal matter, saves children’s lives. In Salvador, Brazil, a recent city-wide sanitation drive has raised sanitation coverage rates from 26 percent to 80 percent.

A study on diarrhoeal morbidity in children under three was conducted in high and low-risk areas of the city. The overall prevalence of diarrhoea fell by 22 percent, but in the poorer areas where sanitation coverage was lowest to start with, prevalence fell by 43 percent.

source : http://esa.un.org