The wounds are treated only if they are well known. Eight years after the statement of the Objectives of the millennium for development, the Organisation of the United Nations takes stock of the situation on the health aspects linked to the quality of the water. In a report of sixty pages, published in English, the experts of the Organisation raise a catalogue of reasons of diseases, linked directly or indirectly to the water.

They always die so so much from diarrheas: every year, it is 1,4 million children that die from the cholera, from dysentery, from typhoid fever, etc. Second reason of decease (860 000 children every year), malnutrition weakens infantile organisms and makes them more vulnerable in infections linked to the bad quality of the water.

Infections linked to the presence of poetry, the nématodes, touch the third of the population of developing countries. There still, it is the bad quality of the water and the absence of treatment of wastewaters that causes more than two thousand million infections every year.

Other less known diseases are just as much formidable: the lymphatic filariose handicaps twenty-five million persons in Asia and on the American continent. The trachoma corrupts the vision of five million persons. There still, it is a faulty hygiene which explains massacre. Finally, drowning kills every year 280 000 persons, among whom two - third parties could be saved by the adoption of simple safety regulations.

To quantify the relating weight of each of the reasons of diseases and of decease, the UNO perfected an indicator, Daly. The addendum among lost years (in comparison with life expectancy) because of decease, and among years of life lost by a physical inability. It emerges from study that it is diseases with diarrheas which influence health situation most in the poor countries, with 39 % years of life lost (Dalys), among which the huge majority must be attributed to environmental factors.

Investments in the water and treatment of wastewaters to avoid pollution by faeces would produce spectacular effects however: in the better world, every year, developing countries would have 320 million additional working days; schools would accept an influx of 272 million days of assiduity over.

In the objectives of the millennium, the water appears in a good standing with challenge thrown to reduce by half before 2015 the affected populations by a low-grade water and the absence of latrines. According to the UNO, this target could be reached on the condition of investing 11 thousand million dollars a year, and would produce eight times more treasures …

Picture: © Denis Delbecq - on 2007