Access to Safe Drinking Water
As stated by Huang et al. (2021), A closer look at the technologies reveals that expensive
technologies use imported manufactured components or devices that cannot yet be locally
produced. In the battle to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for safe
drinking water (SDG 6.1), such technologies should be, at best, considered as bridging
solutions. The international community has achieved the Millennium Development Goal 7C
of halving the number of people without access to “improved” water supply by 2015.
However, this success still leaves some 1.8 billion world citizens without safe drinking water,
and 144 million continue to drink untreated surface water drawn from rivers or lakes. It is
hoped now, that through a synthesis of available knowledge and concerted research efforts,
universal access to safe drinking water will be achieved by 2030. For a sustainable self-
reliance in safe drinking water supply, do-it-yourself (DIY) systems should be popularized.
These DIY technologies include biochar and metallic iron (Fe0) based systems. These
relevant technologies should then be further improved through internal processes.
In addition, Price et al. (2019) stated that despite the United Nations' assertion that access
to safe water is a fundamental human right, access to clean drinking water is grossly
inadequate in urban slums, which are home to nearly 1 billion people worldwide. Slum
households are typically compelled to rely on various sources of drinking water to suit their
demands. Water quality, availability, reliability, and price are all factors that influence water
source selection. These factors are not temporally static, but instead vary over multiple
timescales (from sub-daily changes to annual changes and beyond) in response to changes in
the water source itself and changes in the household's ability to use that source. For example,
the cost of water can may change over time in response to water availability (e.g. rainy
season versus dry season) and a slum household's ability to pay for water may change over
time in response to changes in household income.
Moreover, Mogasale et al. (2018) stated that unsafe water is a well-known cause of
typhoid fever, there is yet to be a pooled assessment of the population-level risk of typhoid
fever as a result of exposure to unsafe water. A precise estimate of the risk of typhoid disease
from contaminated water will be valuable in identifying high-risk populations, predicting the
disease burden, and directing preventative and control efforts. When compared to people who
drink unsafe water, which is one of multiple risk factors for typhoid fever, people who drink
safe water are less likely to get typhoid fever. However, typhoid fever global disease burden
estimates frequently extrapolate high-risk group incidence rates to the rest of the population,
which is likely an overestimation. As a result, when extrapolating data from populations
drinking unsafe water to populations drinking clean water, the incidence rates must be
corrected. However, there is no database that offers data on drinking safe or dangerous water
that can be used to estimate the worldwide illness burden. In addition, there is a global
database on population access to improved water that can be used as a proxy for safe water
consumption. As a result, the danger of contaminated water must be linked to unimproved
water. Although the microbiological safety of improved water is inconsistent, it provides a
measure of sanitary protection and is the only data set that can be utilized at the global level
for water-related risk correction, according to a systematic review provided earlier.
According to Byrne et al. (2021), Frequent cases of gastroenteritis, resulting in several
fatalities within remote communities in the Yasawa Islands, Fiji, prompted an urgent drinking
water quality and supply assessment. Escherichia coli was found in all of the sources that
were tested, including wells, springs, and rainwater tanks. The most likely number counts of
Escherichia coli were greater in rain tanks than in well and spring water. Following a review
of different water treatment options that included community engagement, it was found that
chlorination of rain tanks was the most practicable and community-acceptable approach for
dealing with the contamination. The possibility that a normal family rainwater tank could
properly supply water throughout the wet and dry seasons, as well as the anticipated free
chlorine residual that would follow from a program of periodic dosing with 12.5 percent
sodium hypochlorite, were then assessed using a model. The model assumed no chemical
decay of the added chlorine and complete mixing of water and chlorine throughout the tanks.
Chlorine decay testing and detailed chlorine decay modeling could not be conducted (due to
difficulties determining and validating key input parameters such as organic matter
concentration), which is acknowledged to result in uncertainty in the model results,
potentially leading to underestimation of the decay rate.
As stated by Pichel et al. (2019), One of the most pressing issues confronting humanity in
the twenty-first century is the lack of safe drinking water. Despite the global effort, at least 2
billion people's drinking water sources are faecally contaminated, resulting in more than half
a million diarrhoeal fatalities per year, the most of which occur in developing nations. As a
result, technologies for inactivating harmful microorganisms in water are critical for human
health and well-being. However, while traditional drinking water technologies are effective,
they have constraints that limit their widespread adoption. These treatment methods have
high energy and chemical demands, which limits their use in the most vulnerable areas for the
prevention of waterborne infections. Due of these flaws, advanced alternative technologies
are being researched and developed at a rapid pace. Solar disinfection is one of these
alternative ways, which the World Health Organization has identified as one of the most
acceptable methods for providing drinking water in underdeveloped nations.
REFERENCES
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