Unsafe Drinking Water

An estimated 801,000 children younger than 5 years of age perish from diarrhea each year, mostly in developing countries. This amounts to 11% of the 7.6 million deaths of children under the age of five and means that about 2,200 children are dying every day as a result of diarrheal diseases.

Unsafe drinking water, inadequate availability of water for hygiene, and lack of access to sanitation together contribute to about 88% of deaths from diarrheal diseases.

Worldwide, millions of people are infected with neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), many of which are water and/or hygiene-related, such as Guinea Worm Disease, Buruli Ulcer, Trachoma, and Schistosomiasis. These diseases are most often found in places with unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and insufficient hygiene practices.

Worldwide, soil-transmitted helminths infect more than one billion people due to a lack of adequate sanitation Guinea Worm Disease (GWD) is an extremely painful parasitic infection spread through contaminated drinking water. GWD is characterized by spaghetti-like worms up to 1 meter in length slowly emerging from the human body through blisters on the skin anywhere on the body but usually on the lower legs or lower arms. Infection affects poor communities in remote parts of Africa that do not have safe water to drink. In 2015, 22 cases of Guinea Worm Disease were reported. Most of those cases were from Chad (41%)