Clean Drinking Water
Clean water, in terms of human consumption, is defined as water that won't cause you short-term or long-term harm when you drink it. There are many who believe that the most pressing human issue in the twenty-first century will not be war or terrorism or the financial markets but rather clean water. With this in mind, many organizations, both public and private, are trying to spread the reach of clean water all over the world.
Today, more than two and a half billion people on Earth face dehydration and water that is inadequately sanitized. In many parts of the world, the water people drink is full of pathogens and harmful chemicals, which cause severe illnesses in individuals and epidemics among entire populations. For many developing nations, eliminating diseases caused by the water supply is a top priority. Compounding the water problem in many parts of Asia and South America, and elsewhere, is the fact that culturally, the young girls in a family or community are solely responsible for bringing drinking water to the group. They often have to walk for miles to get to a source of water, and then they have to carry up to forty pounds of water on their shoulders back to their homes, which can injure their backs. Moreover, this custom severely reduces the amount of drinking water a family will get in a day.
In order for a population to have clean water, a municipality must treat that water, even if it comes from, say, a spring that for all intents and purposes seems perfectly clean and safe. (The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, is an extremely rare exception: it contains a body of water so pure that people can drink from it without any water treatment at all.) Until developing nations are able to build water treatment infrastructure, individual water filters may be the best means for their citizens to protect themselves against waterborne diseases.
No comments:
Post a Comment