Water Tanks and Clean Water to Save the World
Posted By admin on October 25, 2011
Without safe water made available to homes, families are prone to contract several kinds of illnesses related to water contamination and poisoning. In several rural areas in the world, clean water, pipes, plumbing, water tanks, and reliable water sources are unheard of. In most cases, cities and rural communities are not well educated in managing their precious sources of usable water.
In Bangladesh, about half of the country’s 12 million tube wells are found to contain harmful levels of arsenic, simply because the tubes were not dug deep enough, at least 100 meters deep. Either the Bangladeshi Government was not aware of this required depth or did not properly supervise the installations. There’s no saying how many people were unsuspectingly poisoned by arsenic.
The poisoning may have not been lethal but surely physical injuries have been inflicted. Arsenic poisoning is a threat all over the world, and mostly due to contaminated water sources. About 140 million people are affected in 70 countries.
These numbers alone prove the necessity of checking the world’s water sources in order to prevent senseless injuries and even deaths. Plumbing systems, pipes and reservoirs must be checked regularly. Governments of developing countries have spent millions of dollars in related projects.
While there may not be reported deaths due to water contamination in Bangladesh, the government should look into the matter before anything worse happens. It has been reported that Bangladesh has received international money to improve the situation. Sadly, not much has been done.
Meanwhile, there are much worse cases elsewhere in the world. In developing countries, children under 5 years old are dying from diarrhea due to unclean water, and made complicated by malnutrition. All over the world, 90% of all deaths from water-related diarrhea occur in children who are too weak to resist the infection since they have not been eating enough.
In Africa, about 769,000 children under 5 years old died from diarrhea each year from 2000 to 2003. A huge number of these deaths could have been prevented by building just one clean water tank in any of the affected areas. In developed countries, there were 700 children under 5 that suffered the same fate from diarrheal disease.
Cleaner water supplies reduce the number of deaths due to diarrhea by as much as 25%. In developed countries, drinking water is stored, treated, and distributed properly, thereby reducing cases of diarrhea by 39%. This should serve as an example to all the nations in the world.
Meanwhile, studies have determined that around the world, the most common water contamination is from sewage, which means, in some parts of the world, human fecal parasites are making their way into consumable drinking water. This news is definitely hard to swallow. In 2006, surveys revealed that about 1.1 billion people did not have proper drinking water, and in the same year, 1.8 million people died from water-related illnesses.
Poor access to clean water could lead to preventable deaths. In these parts of the world, the simple and inexpensive installation of water tanks, purifiers and filters could save millions of lives. An efficient water system allows the safe and efficient distribution of potable water to several homes within a community.
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