"As many as 76 million
people - mainly children - will die from preventable, water-related
diseases by 2020 even if current United Nations goals are reached,"
said Peter H. Gleick, director of the nonprofit policy research institute.
The United Nations now says that some 1.2 billion people around the globe
live without access to safe water and 2.5 billion are without sanitation,
vulnerable to deadly diseases ranging from diarrhea and dysentery to
cholera, typhoid and insect-borne illness.
By comparison, the United
Nations recently estimated that, unless prevention programs are expanded,
AIDS would kill 65 million people by 2020. The Pacific Institute said one
cause of the water crisis was the current emphasis by many countries on
building large, centralized water systems which cannot be maintained by
local resources. Smaller, community based water systems are often ignored
in water development plans, it said.
Between two and five million
people are now believed to die annually because of water-related illness,
most of them children in developing countries who fall victim to virulent
but preventable diarrheal diseases.
The World Health Organization,
in a report issued in 2000, estimated that there are already four billion
cases of diarrhea each year, killing as many as five million people.
Gleick said that South Africa,
host to the Earth Summit, provided one example of successful water access
policy, noting that the government has made efforts to involve local
communities in water planning.
Story by Andrew Quinn
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