World Water Week highlights importance of clean drinking water

According to the annual gathering of the global water community gathered at World Water Week, Stockholm, Sweden (21-26 August), a glass of clean drinking water is where health and advancement of impoverished communities around the globe must begin: 'with nearly one person in five globally lacking access to safe drinking water, healthy water practices and products are fundamental to the preservation, protection and improvement of both individual and community well-being'.

C.T. Howlett Jr , secretariat of the World Chlorine Council (WCC), a global network of national and regional trade associations and their member companies representing the chlorine and chlorinated products industries, added: 'the presence of waterborne disease is an unmistakable sign of a community in distress. The results of this daily public health disaster - poverty, disease, malnutrition, environmental deterioration and high infant mortality - can be drastically reduced through simple and direct interven-tions of chlorine-based products, whether in the form of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) piping for community water transport or as a household water disinfectant'.

Under the 'Safe Water Delivered Safely' banner, the WCC supports humanitarian efforts to save and improve lives around the world through development and investment in international clean water projects, and through global relief efforts such as the tsunami relief efforts, for which the WCC member associations, Euro Chlor and the Chlorine Chemistry Council, coordinated an industry response, raising over $150,000 to aid water and sanitation efforts being carried out by the American Red Cross; and the West Africa Water Initiative (WAWI), a multi-partner alliance working in some of the most arid regions of western Africa focused on providing sustainable water supplies, reducing disease, and improving water management in Ghana, Mali, and Niger.

It is also a partner of the International Network to Promote Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage, organised by the WHO, which supports the wide-spread adoption of simple, low-cost technologies with the intention of improving the quality of water used in individual homes and reducing levels of waterborne disease. For example, in communities where safe water supplies are not available, specially packaged chlorine bleach used to disinfect household water has been shown to reduce diarrhoea cases by 25-50%.