So, I'm sitting here at my desk, enjoying a bottle of your run of the mill spring water, just working and typing along seemingly without a care in the world. However, I do care--I care about the world's current state of affairs when it comes to universal access to clean water. For those of you unfamiliar, today is Blog Action Day and the theme (as you can probably guess) is Water.
My mother often refers to water as the elixir of life, the powerful force that sustains us all. And although water is supposed to be free, it is not accessible to those who need it.
Here are some quick facts taken from water.org :
- 3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease.
- The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.
- Poor people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city.
- An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than a typical person in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.
- Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease
- Millions of women and children spend several hours a day collecting water from distant, often polluted sources.
- Investment in drinking-water and sanitation would result in 272 million more school attendance days a year. The value of deaths averted, based on discounted future earnings, would amount to US$ 3.6 billion a year
- Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use
Resources for more info:
World Water Day: http://www.worldwaterday.org
Global International Waters Assessment: http://www.giwa.net/
Blog Action Day 2010: http://blogactionday.change.org/
"Creativity is a Drug I can't live without"
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