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One in six people lack safe drinking waterOne in six people lack safe drinking water, UN summit told Environment ministers from around the globe focused yesterday on improving the world’s water resources and sanitation as they gathered for the second day of a United Nations summit. About one in six people lack access to safe drinking water, while 2.4 billion lacked access to basic sanitation, warned the UN Environment Programme, with UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer saying that nearly 5,000 children die every day from diseases caused by a lack of water. The agency said supplying safe water was increasingly difficult because the world population was growing rapidly, by 77 million people a year. The discussions in the South Korean resort island of Jeju will form a basis for talks next month in New York with the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. That meeting will assess progress towards the United Nation’s target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. In Jeju, delegates would try to generate an initiative that would identify concrete measures to achieve those goals, UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said. Air pollution cloaking Asian and other mega-cities of the world is also high on the conference agenda. In particular, experts are concerned about the environmental threat from sand storms driven from the deserts of China over the Korean peninsula and Japan, reaching even the US West Coast. Meanwhile, delegates heard that small island “paradise” countries are increasingly being trashed by piles of solid waste and sewage they have neither the money nor space to cope with. Small island nations are especially vulnerable because they are burdened by an influx of tourism, but often lack the landfill space, expensive incinerators or treatment plants to deal with garbage and human waste. Since the early 1990s, the level of plastic waste on small islands has increased fivefold, according to a UNEP study. In the Caribbean, about 90 per cent of sewage is discharged untreated into surrounding seas; in the Pacific, about 98 per cent. Worldwide, about one in 20 people who go swimming in the oceans get sick because of such discharge, said Veerle Vandeweed, chief co-ordinator of the study. Ironically, most of the environmental damage from tourism came during the construction of resorts, not their operation, because of decisions to build too close to fragile coastlines and industrial waste, Mr Vandeweed said. The rapid development could backfire on the islands if their allure as a tourist destination was spoiled by environmental degradation, the agency warned. The shoreline of the Pacific island of Nauru, for example, appeared blue-green in aerial photos, not from coral reefs but from mounds of discarded beer cans, it said. The piled-up trash also supported vermin that carried diseases such as plague. “Many small island paradises are heaving under rising levels of rubbish and waste,” the UNEP report said. “Such wastes are not only unsightly and a threat to wildlife, they can also contaminate rivers and ground waters as they slowly degrade,” Mr Toepfer said. The Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 45 island nations, were working with aid agencies, private industry and other governments to win access to better waste disposal technology and funding, Chairman Jagdish Koonjul said. Sanitation problems were exacerbated on the islands because of the lack of fresh water. Rising ocean levels, triggered in part by global warming, had meant freshwater wells were increasingly tainted with seawater, Mr Koonjul said. Source: South China Morning Post March 31, 2004 posted by Prawate on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 One in six people lack safe drinking waterOne in six people lack safe drinking water, UN summit told Environment ministers from around the globe focused yesterday on improving the world’s water resources and sanitation as they gathered for the second day of a United Nations summit. About one in six people lack access to safe drinking water, while 2.4 billion lacked access to basic sanitation, warned the UN Environment Programme, with UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer saying that nearly 5,000 children die every day from diseases caused by a lack of water. The agency said supplying safe water was increasingly difficult because the world population was growing rapidly, by 77 million people a year. The discussions in the South Korean resort island of Jeju will form a basis for talks next month in New York with the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. That meeting will assess progress towards the United Nation’s target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. In Jeju, delegates would try to generate an initiative that would identify concrete measures to achieve those goals, UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said. Air pollution cloaking Asian and other mega-cities of the world is also high on the conference agenda. In particular, experts are concerned about the environmental threat from sand storms driven from the deserts of China over the Korean peninsula and Japan, reaching even the US West Coast. Meanwhile, delegates heard that small island “paradise” countries are increasingly being trashed by piles of solid waste and sewage they have neither the money nor space to cope with. Small island nations are especially vulnerable because they are burdened by an influx of tourism, but often lack the landfill space, expensive incinerators or treatment plants to deal with garbage and human waste. Since the early 1990s, the level of plastic waste on small islands has increased fivefold, according to a UNEP study. In the Caribbean, about 90 per cent of sewage is discharged untreated into surrounding seas; in the Pacific, about 98 per cent. Worldwide, about one in 20 people who go swimming in the oceans get sick because of such discharge, said Veerle Vandeweed, chief co-ordinator of the study. Ironically, most of the environmental damage from tourism came during the construction of resorts, not their operation, because of decisions to build too close to fragile coastlines and industrial waste, Mr Vandeweed said. The rapid development could backfire on the islands if their allure as a tourist destination was spoiled by environmental degradation, the agency warned. The shoreline of the Pacific island of Nauru, for example, appeared blue-green in aerial photos, not from coral reefs but from mounds of discarded beer cans, it said. The piled-up trash also supported vermin that carried diseases such as plague. “Many small island paradises are heaving under rising levels of rubbish and waste,” the UNEP report said. “Such wastes are not only unsightly and a threat to wildlife, they can also contaminate rivers and ground waters as they slowly degrade,” Mr Toepfer said. The Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 45 island nations, were working with aid agencies, private industry and other governments to win access to better waste disposal technology and funding, Chairman Jagdish Koonjul said. Sanitation problems were exacerbated on the islands because of the lack of fresh water. Rising ocean levels, triggered in part by global warming, had meant freshwater wells were increasingly tainted with seawater, Mr Koonjul said. Source: South China Morning Post March 31, 2004 posted by Prawate on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 Free AIDS treatment delayed in South AfricaJOHANNESBURG: Three months ago, the South African government promised to provide free antiretroviral medication to people with AIDS, planning to supply as many as 1.4 million of them within five years. But only on Feb. 13 did the government solicit proposals from pharmaceutical companies that supply the life-prolonging drugs, pushing back the start of treatment for thousands of patients. A chart in the government’s plan, released in November, estimated that as many as 53,000 people would be receiving the drugs by the end of March. But the country’s controversial health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, now denies that the government ever promised that the program would begin before April. Sibani Mngadi, the health minister’s spokesman, said that the delay was caused by the need to check out clinics where drugs will be dispensed, set up a system to track patients and write training manuals for health professionals. “This is a major project,” he said. “We need to make sure we do the ground-work. We can’t take shortcuts.” The delay has drawn furious criticism from AIDS patients and their advocates, who say that it may be several months before the government begins to treat patients. “There is no excuse for the program continuing to be delayed,” said Nathan Geffen, head of the Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for AIDS treatment. “The money is there. Everything is ready.” South Africa has one of the biggest AIDS epidemics in the world. An estimated 12 percent of its population, or five million people, are infected with HIV. No one knows for certain how many South Africans die of the disease each day, but estimates range from 600 to nearly twice that. After years of questioning whether HIV causes AIDS, the government of President Thabo Mbeki announced in mid-November that it would more than triple its AIDS budget to about $1.7 billion over the next three years. Much of that is marked for antiretroviral drugs. Geffen said that the Health Ministry had at least $14 million on hand that it could use. He said that the provincial government of the Western Cape had demonstrated that it was possible to act faster to save lives. There, 1,800 patients are being treated with antiretroviral drugs at 13 different clinics and hospitals, said Fareed Abdullah, deputy director of the provincial Health Department. In the next year, Abdullah said, the number of treatment sites should be tripled, the eventual goal being to treat the 5,000 to 10,000 people in the province. He said that the provincial government was sharing the cost with Western donors and building on three years of pilot projects. “We know which drugs to use, how to buy them, how to keep records, how to employ the staff, the doctors and nurses, “he said. But Mngadi, the Health Ministry spokesman, said that South Africa’s other eight provinces were not so well equipped. And Dr. Kgosi Letlape, who heads the South African Medical Association, said he did not want to criticize the government’s program before it got off the ground. Critics say the delays are symptomatic of the lack of political will in South Africa to confront AIDS. Geffen said that Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang continued publicly to play down the seriousness of the problem to sow confusion about the disease. Source: International Herald Tribune, February 21-22, 2004 posted by Prawate on Wednesday, March 10, 2004 |
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