World water situation 'unacceptable': WHO

Indian activists of Greenpeace and representatives of pollution-victim communities from across the country shout slogans and wave placards as they take part in a protest march marking the World Water Day in New Delhi yesterday. Hundreds of activists marched towards parliament demanding of the government to ensure clean drinking water as ordered by the Supreme Court of India. PHOTO: AFP

WHO Director-General Lee Jong-Wook said an estimated 30,000 people, most of them children, die of such diseases every week.

"Peope who can turn on a tap and have safe and clean water to drink, to cook with and to bathe in often take it for granted, and yet more than one billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water," Lee said.

"Every week, diarrhoeal disease due to easily preventable causes claims the lives of 30,000 people, most of them young children. This is a silent humanitarian crisis that thwarts progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)," he said.

The goals, adopted at a global UN summit in 2000 included a pledge to halve the number of people with no access to clean drinking water, currently estimated at about 1.1 billion, by 2015. Two years later, a world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg added a commitment to halve the number of people -- some 2.4 billion -- who have no basic sanitation.