One of the most important elements to establishing world peace and good health is making sure that all people have access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization defines access to safe drinking water as a person’s having a source of clean, harmless water for drinking, cooking and hygiene that is located less than a kilometer away from that person’s home. Access also means that each person living in a household gets at least twenty liters of safe drinking water every day. Tragically, around the world at least 880 million people do not have access to safe drinking water–and some experts would put that number at over a billion. And so 1.6 million people die every year of diarrhea-causing diseases, and nine out of ten of those victims are children under five years old.
Hundreds of millions of other people who drink dirty water suffer from all kinds of illnesses, including infections of the throat and intestines, blindness, and diseases caused by parasites like hookworms.
The World Health Organization is currently working to get the percentage of human beings with access to safe drinking water up to at least 88.5.Reaching this goal would mean taking great strides towards other WHO goals, including eliminating hunger, reducing child mortality rates across the globe, improving the health of mothers and their children in developing nations, improving the environment, increasing genderequality worldwide, and even increasing global literacy rates. Access to safe drinking water is also a top priority of governments all over the world, of the United Nations, and of countless private health and philanthropic organizations.
