A call to ensure the right to sanitation
UN resolution should acknowledge sanitation as human right
Health is wealth! Since our childhood we have been reading and learning this wise saying from different sources. When we talk about improved health, we talk about food, nutrition, cleanliness, etc. But we hardly consider unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and insufficient hygiene as important factors contributing to poor health. Diseases like diarrhoea are caused by the ingestion of pathogens, especially from drinking of unsafe water, contaminated food or unclean hands. Studies show that a very few number of people wash their hands properly after defecation. Many health hazards are being centered on sanitation facilities. Even safe distance from a latrine to a water point is not maintained in most of the cases in a poor country like Bangladesh. When the whole world is giving special emphasis on sanitation to improve health status of poor people, especially women and children, a draft resolution on the human right to water and sanitation is currently being discussed in the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Throughout the negotiations there has been talk of removing sanitation and focusing only on water. Development activists are afraid that sanitation may not be acknowledged as a human right by the United Nations. A systematic analysis of child mortality recently published in the medical journal The Lancet found that diarrhoea, caused by poor or non-existent sanitation is now the biggest killer of children under five in Africa. The numbers of people without access to sanitation are rising. The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Report notes that 2.7 billion people will not have access to sanitation by 2015. It is impossible to realise the recognised right to the adequate standard of living without access to sanitation. "The Millennium Development Goal 7: Environmental sustainability" will not be ensured without achieving its "Target 3: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation". Changing the above situation requires dedicated political will from country level; but this will be greatly undermined if sanitation is not included in the UN resolution. Now this is time for all development professionals to act hand in hand so that sanitation gets its due emphasis and recognition as a human right from the United Nations to reduce morbidity and mortality of poor and vulnerable segment of the society around the globe.
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