Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene January - February 2016 vol.11 no.1 | Page 11

NEWS in brief

Global Highlights

The participating countries are Aruba, Australia, Canada,
Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic,
Fiji, France, Guinea Bissau, Kiribati, Madagascar, Mexico,
Monaco, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Palau,
Senegal, Seychelles, Spain, and Sweden.

An Aedes albopictus or Asian Tiger
Mosquito, spreads dengue fever, the world’s
fastest growing mosquito-borne disease.
(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

About 500 Children Die Daily In Sub-Saharan Africa
Due To Lack of Clean Water, Sanitation

Yet Brazil isn’t just fighting Zika.

West and Central Africa need about $30 billion a year to get
access to universal sanitation and clean water.

That country is also combating outbreaks caused by dengue
and chikungunya viruses, which are known for causing
fevers and debilitating joint pain. Dengue can be fatal.

Every day, about 500 children in the sub-Saharan Africa
die due to diarrheal diseases, a soaring figure that could be
curbed with some simple measures, experts say.
UNICEF announced the grave rate on recently, ahead of
a conference in Dakar, Senegal, where investment banks,
international organizations and businesses will work toward
finding ways to raise the funds needed to prevent these
fatalities. Kids are succumbing to these illnesses due to the
fact that they lack access to clean drinking water, proper
sanitation and hygiene.
It would cost about $30 billion a year to bring sanitation
and clean water to Central and West Africa, according to
UNICEF.
“It cannot be business as usual,” Manuel Fontaine,
UNICEF regional director for West and Central Africa,
said in a statement. “The pace of progress has to speed
up exponentially — and it’s going to take strong policies;
robust financing; and a major shift in priorities among those
who have the power to act.”
Source: The excerpt originally appeared in the Post. Story by
Eleanor Goldberg

As diseases proliferate, mosquitoes becoming
Public Enemy No. 1
The Zika virus is causing concerns across Central and South America.
There is no vaccine known at this time but it can be deadly for children.
As diseases go, Zika virus was always considered minor
league.
It didn’t make people all that sick; most infected people had
no symptoms at all. Zika was confined to a relatively narrow
belt that ran from equatorial Africa to Asia.
Today, Zika has spread to Central and South America and is
linked to an alarming increase in once-rare birth defects in
Brazil. Although Zika was first diagnosed in Brazil in May,
it’s been linked to more than 3,500 cases of microcephaly,
in which infants are born with small heads and immature
brain development.

The USA needs to prepare for a similar scenario, in which
epidemics of multiple mosquito-borne diseases break out
simultaneously, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who
co-wrote a new report in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Source: USA Today
California Plans Nation’s Largest Recycled Water
Supply Program
Southern California
is looking for ways to
make better use of
wastewater in what
could become the
largest recycled water
supply program in the
nation.
“The board of directors of Metropolitan Water District,
Southern California’s largest water importer, has approved
a plan to explore a large-scale regional treatment project
to purify wastewater currently discharged into the Pacific
Ocean and instead use it to recharge local groundwater
basins,” BizJournals reported.
“The board authorized an agreement with the Sanitation
Districts of Los Angeles County to develop a 1-milliongallon-per-day demonstration plant and also to establish
terms and conditions for future development,” the report
said.
The plan would require a significant facility upgrade for
the district. “Metropolitan could ultimately build a new
purification plant to produce up to 168,000 acre-feet per
year at the sanitation district’s Joint Water Pollution Control
Plant in Carson along with about 30 miles of distribution
pipelines to replenish groundwater basins in Los Angeles
and Orange counties,” district officials explained in a
statement.
Metropolitan Board Chairman Randy Record explained the
significance of the plan.

Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • January - February 2016

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