Water, sanitation, and hygiene : simple, effective solutions save lives

These fact sheets presents a brief summary of water, sanitation and hygiene priorities. In the developing world access to safe water should be improved. While sometimes not considered a public health priority, improvements to water supply, sanitation services, and hygiene promotion greatly reduce the incidence of diarrheal diseases, trachoma, and water-based parasitic diseases. Improvements to these services are generally financed by transportation or infrastructure sectors and not part of health expenditures. However there are many steps public health policy makers can take, at low-cost, to ensure that services and benefits are optimized. If uncontaminated water is available, reliable, and convenient to collect, more water is consumed, both for hygienic purposes and for drinking. Inadequate water supply accounts for a variety of diseases transmitted in different ways. Diarrheas, dysenteries, and typhoid are the most prevalent water-related diseases and account for over 90 percent of deaths, half of the inpatient bed nights, and a third of outpatient consultations preventable by a safe water supply. Children bear the brunt of the burden, the majority of them are under age 5, most of them under age 2.
Hygiene promotion can be a cost-effective way to encourage and educate consumers to maximize the benefits of available water and reduce the water-related disease burden. Studies show that promotional activities do not need to be continuous because behavior change, and subsequent reductions in morbidity and mortality, lasts for as many as five years after the intervention takes place. Interventions eventually need to be repeated, but not frequently.