Water is life's essential ingredient. Its importance for basic human survival and for food and energy production as well as for many other fundamental needs of the society gives this resource a significant role in socio-economic development. Water is, indeed, one of earth's most precious and most vulnerable to pollution. While health is also precious to all of us, it is also equally vulnerable to water borne diseases. There is a close link between health and water, not only through drinking water, but also through the adverse impacts of inadequate wastewater disposal and water shortages on public hygiene.
Unsafe water is a breeding ground of disease and poverty.
The impact of water on health is clearly evidenced by the frightening statistic that some 3.4 million people, mostly children, die annually from water-related diseases, of which diarrhea diseases, including cholera, account for two million deaths annually. In poor countries diarrhea is a major cause of deaths and water related infections are a major cause of mortality in the developing countries of the South. By 2000, the numbers have grown to at least 1.1 billion people without access to safe water supply and almost 2.5 billion lacking adequate sanitation. It calls for action on broad front, starting with an assessment or update by Governments of their current situation, based on reliable data and on the establishment of time-bound and realistic targets. To reduce by half, between now and 2015, the proportion of people who lack sustainable access to adequate sources of affordable and safe water.