More than one billion people drink unsafe water and over 2.6 billion, around 40 percent of the world's population, have no access to basic sanitation according to the UN.

"Around the world, millions of children are being born into a silent emergency of simple needs," said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy. "We have to act now to close this (health) gap or the death toll will certainly rise," she added.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF, the Children's Fund, said in a report children were particularly vulnerable to sicknesses brought on by dirty water and poor hygiene.

Diarrhea kills some 1.8 million people each year, most of them children under five, with millions left permanently debilitated, they said.

The report -- Meeting the Millennium Development Goals -- aims to measure progress in achieving the U.N. target of halving the percentage of people around the world without safe water and sanitation by 2015.

For water, the goal was clearly achievable, with some 83 percent of people already having access to supplies giving some guarantees of safety, up from 77 percent in 1990 -- the base year for the millennium goals, they said.

But progress was uneven, with some 42 percent of the 1.1 billion people without access to safe water living in sub-Saharan Africa.

On sanitation, however, the picture was less encouraging, with the percentage of those with at least a minimum acceptable standard rising only to 58 percent in 2002, the last year for which figures were available, from 49 percent in 1990.

On current trends, that would leave 2.4 billion without such access in 2015, little changed from the current figure.

Some 1.5 billion of those currently without access to safe sanitation were living in India and China.

Reference Source 89
August 26, 2004

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