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This spring the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated theearly completion the 2015 development goal of bringing improved drinking water to an additional two billion people since 1990. "Today we recognize a great achievement for the people of theworld," United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said atthe occasion. "The successful efforts to provide greateraccess to drinking water." The feat was a landmark in securing what the U.N. General Assembly declared in 2010 was a universal human right: "access to safe and cleanwater." In an effort to improve health and quality of lifeacross the world between 1990 and 2015, the U.N. established eightMillennium Development Goals (MDG). One of the sub targets was to"halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population withoutaccess to safe drinking water and basic sanitation ." And by early 2012 only approximately 800 million people around theglobe still relied on "unimproved" water sources such asstreams, ditches or unprotected wells, which are the most likelyplaces for contaminated water . Pipes, boreholes and protected wells are much more likely toprevent contact with dangerous pathogens, chemicals or sewagerunoff. But just because water is pouring out of a spigot does not meanthat it is safe to drink. In poorer areas, where infrastructure andsanitation are often much worse, even sources of water that havebeen "improved" are frequently at risk for contaminationby human and animal feces, according to recent analyses. Improved but not necessarily safe One report , published earlier this year in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization , analyzed water quality test data from five countries (Ethiopia,Jordan, Nicaragua, Nigeria and Tajikistan) and found that manysources of "improved" water failed the safety test. Whenthese improved waters were tested and compared with survey dataabout where people got most of their water, the estimates for thepopulations that have access to safe drinking water fell by 16percent in Nicaragua, 15 percent in Nigeria, 11 percent in Ethiopiaand 7 percent in Tajikistan. (Jordan, which primarily uses publicutilities to pipe water, remained at a relatively high percentage.)Additionally, the study authors noted, the number of people who hadaccess to safe—and not just improved—water in 1990 waslikely much lower than previously estimated, which means that the2015 target is even farther away than estimated by the currentrubric. Extrapolating from these five very different countries spread overthree continents to the rest of the globe is difficult. But onegroup of researchers at the Gillings School of Global PublicHealth's Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tooka shot at it in their March International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health paper. They estimate that some 1.8 billion people—28 percent ofthe population worldwide—was using unsafe water as of 2010.That is far more than the 783 million (or 11 percent) estimated byWHO and UNICEF to have access to improved water sources. Theresearchers acknowledge that their "estimate isimprecise," but "the magnitude of the estimate and thehealth and development implications suggest that greater attentionis needed to better understand and manage drinking watersafety." And other experts in the field agree that theirestimate is a good ballpark figure for the true disparity. I am an expert from chinadrillingequipment.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China Desander , China Drilling Accessories, drilling rigs,drilling equipment,and more.
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