There is a lot of discussion about the illnesses that medical organizations like the United Nations World Health Organization should try to deal with. For example, obesity, malaria, and cancer are three of the biggest killers in the world, and a lot of money is spent on the treatment of these illnesses. However, reports suggest that the development of clean water and good sanitation would result in the prevention of many more diseases.
Many people die every day, and the explanation is simple. An analysis of the figures shows that nearly half of the people in the developing world suffer from one of the main diseases connected to unsafe water. For example, 2.5 billion people in the world do not have good enough sanitation. That means that almost 40% of the world's population is at risk from diseases connected to poor sanitation. Another calculation shows that 768 million people do not have access to safe drinking water. This is about one in ten people in the world. Even non-serious illnesses, such as diarrhoea, caused by unsafe water, kill 700,000 children every year – that's about 2,000 children every day.
The United Nations World Health Organization wants everyone to have cheap and easy access to clean water. For instance, water should be no more than 1,000 metres from your house, it should take no more than 30 minutes to collect it, and it should cost only three per cent of the household income. Since the identification of so many diseases connected to unsafe water, there has been an improvement in the situation – today, there are 1.3 billion more people with clean water than 20 years ago.