UNISON Report On Sanitation Proves Developing World Deaths Are Preventable, UK

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 24 Mar 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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Radical action is urgently needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of people dying needlessly from cholera and diarrhoea in the developing world. The report, published to coincide with World Water Day, calls on the Government and the international community to step up and end this injustice.

UNISON General Secretary, Dave Prentis, said:

"In this year of sanitation the international community cannot stand aside whilst 326,000 children could be saved each year by universal sanitation provision - a number equal to eliminating annual infant deaths from AIDS. We should all have the same rights to a decent quality of life, but in reality this vision is a long way off. The provision of sewerage systems in developing world cities and urban slums is a crucial step in the right direction."

"Total amounts required are affordable, indeed only half the amount the UK Government have spent on Northern Rock would finance 80% of sewer connections for every city on earth." "We need a combination of international aid and in country taxation programmes to make sewerage systems affordable. Sewers in the developing world are currently not included in millennium development goals for sanitation. This indignity will continue if donors and service providers continue to insist on full cost recovery. The private sector cannot be relied on to provide investment in much needed sewerage systems. Only public investment will work."

The report* refers to our own British history to justify investment in urban sewers. The BMA recently recognised the construction of public sewers as the most important development in public health in the last 100 years. The report calls for sewerage in cities to be provided as an essential public service funded by national taxation and development aid - arguing that otherwise the poor who are most in need, will continue to be excluded.

A programme to construct public sewers in the cities of the South would help boost local economies and cut poverty and create meaningful jobs. In the long term, sewerage systems would significantly contribute not just to the achievement of the millennium development goal on sanitation but on health. Schemes would go a long way to tackling poverty and creating the productive, healthy workforce crucial to development. Public services underpin the values that hold society together, so in strengthening public sanitation we would we help to create a fairer society for all.

http://www.unison.org.uk