The immediate answer to this question is that washing hands with water and soap saves lives. Washing hands with water and soap can reduce diarrhoeal incidence by one-third. Diarrhoea still claims two million lives each year.
Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene
WASH is also the acronym for water supply, sanitation and hygiene. As a combined approach this can reduce diarrhoeal disease even more than washing hands does. This combined approach is regularly preached, yet not always practised. Often, the focus is on one of the three fields, most often water supply. “Water is hot, sanitation is not” unfortunately seems to be the current mantra in the humanitarian and development sector. But what is the effect of providing public water stands or improving wells, when the collected water is contaminated again after collection, during transport, storage or handling at home?
WASH is also the acronym for water supply, sanitation and hygiene. As a combined approach this can reduce diarrhoeal disease even more than washing hands does. This combined approach is regularly preached, yet not always practised. Often, the focus is on one of the three fields, most often water supply. “Water is hot, sanitation is not” unfortunately seems to be the current mantra in the humanitarian and development sector. But what is the effect of providing public water stands or improving wells, when the collected water is contaminated again after collection, during transport, storage or handling at home?
Preventing and controlling disease
While today children in the developed world play on their latest version Playstation, chat with their friends via internet or mobile phones, in less developed countries diarrhoea still claims nearly two million lives per year, of which 80% are children. This means 6,000 children die of diarrhoea each day, one every fourteen seconds.
Besides causing two million deaths annually, diarrhoea also leads to malnutrition, another mass killer in the developing world. Numerous types of intestinal worms, the result of poor sanitation and hygiene, also cause mass malnutrition. And even if a child overcomes malnutrition, this still has an irreversible negative effect on its growth and development.
Vector control
The incidence of another deadly disease, malaria, can also be dramatically reduced through WASH interventions. Stagnant water, the breeding ground of malarial mosquitoes, can be reduced or prevented by proper waste water management. Other vector control measures, such as larvaciding and indoor residual spraying also reduce the spread of malaria. Vector control can also be an effective tool in reducing the incidence of dengue, yellow fever and other vector-borne diseases.
Standard of living and dignity
Hence the importance of WASH in controlling and preventing disease. The effects of improved WASH services, however, go beyond reducing morbidity and mortality; they also largely improve the standard of life. This means women and children won’t need to spend half of each day walking to collect a minimum of water, women won’t need to wait until nightfall to relieve themselves, adolescent girls won’t have to miss school one week each month when they are menstruating nor decide to drop out of school completely when they reach that age.
Emergencies
In an emergency situation, often the result of a natural or man-made disaster, WASH is of even greater importance. People often have to relocate and they become stranded in overcrowded, unhygienic places with little or no water supply and sanitary facilities. Health facilities are often dysfunctional, people are weakened by the event, the long journey and possible lack of food and they are therefore much more susceptible to diseases. Providing water supply and sanitary facilities, or restoring them, is therefore a top priority in such a situation.
All in all, enough reason why one needs (to) WASH for life
