Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene September - October 2016 Vol. 11 No.4 | Page 39

Water & Health
Drinking-water

Economic and social effects

Contaminated water and poor sanitation are linked to
transmission of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea,
dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio. Absent,
inadequate, or inappropriately managed water and

When water comes from improved and more accessible
sources, people spend less time and effort in physically
collecting it, meaning they can be productive in other
ways. It can also result in greater personal safety by
reducing the need to make long or risky journeys
to collect water. Better water sources also mean less
expenditure on health, as people are less likely to fall ill
and incur medical costs, and are better able to remain
economically productive.
With children particularly at risk from water-related
diseases, access to improved sources of water can result
in better health and therefore better school attendance,
with longer-term consequences for their lives.

Water, Sanitation & Environmentally-related
Hygiene
sanitation services expose individuals to preventable
health risks. This is particularly the case in health care
facilities where both patients and staff are placed at
additional risk of infection and disease when water,
sanitation and hygiene services are lacking. Globally,
15% of patients develop an infection during a hospital
stay, with the proportion much greater in low-income
countries.

Hygiene refers to behaviors that can improve cleanliness

Inadequate management of urban, industrial and
agricultural wastewater means the drinking-water
of hundreds of millions of people is dangerously
contaminated or chemically polluted.
Some 842 000 people are estimated to die each year from
diarrhoea as a result of unsafe drinking-water, sanitation
and hand hygiene. But diarrhoea is largely preventable,
and the deaths of 361 000 children aged under 5 each
year could be avoided each year if these risk factors were
addressed. Where water is not readily available, people
may decide handwashing is not a priority, thereby adding
to the likelihood of diarrhoea and other diseases.
Diarrhoea is the most widely known disease linked to
contaminated food and water but there are other hazards.
Almost 240 million people are affected by schistosomiasis
– an acute and chronic disease caused by parasitic worms
contracted through exposure to infested water.
In many parts of the world, insects that live or breed in
water carry and transmit diseases such as dengue fever. Some
of these insects, known as vectors, breed in clean, rather
than dirty water, and household drinking-water containers
can serve as breeding grounds. The simple intervention
of covering water storage containers can reduce vector
breeding and may also have a co-benefit of reducing faecal
contamination of water at the household level.

and lead to good health, such as frequen