A new report by the WHO and UNICEF warns that vicious cycle of ill-health and poverty could defeat human development efforts, with children the first to suffer.
More than 2.6 billion people - over 40 per cent of the world’s population - do not have access to basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water
Entitled Meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) drinking water and sanitation target - A mid-term assessment of progress, the report details the progress of individual countries, regions, and the world as a whole between the MDG baseline year of 1990 and the half-way mark of 2002. It makes two significant predictions on reaching the 2015 goals, based on progress to date :
The global sanitation target will be missed by half a billion people - most of them in rural Africa and Asia - allowing waste and disease to spread, killing millions of children and leaving millions more on the brink of survival.
The world is on track to meet the drinking water target.
The agencies warned that a global trend towards urbanization is marginalising the rural poor and putting huge strain on basic services in cities. As a result, families living in rural villages and urban slums are being trapped in a cycle of ill-health and poverty. Children are always the first to suffer from the burden of disease caused by dirty water and poor hygiene, while the wider impact of unhygienic environments drags back economic progress and erodes good governance.
In July 2004 the European Commission and the World Health Organisation (WHO) signed an agreement to boost their joint efforts to improve health conditions in developing countries.
DG SANCO, DG Development and the WHO focus their efforts to reduce the death rate among women in pregnancy and childbirth ; accelerate action on diseases such as AIDS and malaria ; and strengthen systems for generating information about the performance of health systems in developing countries.
