PAKISTAN: Waterborne Diseases on Tap

Iftikhar Hussain

PESHAWAR, Mar 20 2006 (IPS) – Twelve-year-old Abdul Sattar Khan appears almost lifeless as he rests on the frail shoulders of his veiled mother, Kamala Bibi, at the Lady Reading Hospital (LRH).
She had brought Abdul to the hospital from remote Razaro village, Charsadda district, 35 km away, and was told that her son was suffering from severe dehydration after a four-day bout of diarrhoea.

Abdul will recover, the doctors say, but others may not be so lucky to survive the consequences of drinking contaminated water.

Nearly 60 percent of patients at the city s hospitals are suffering from waterborne diseases, says Dr Amjad Ali as he examines a girl victim on his rounds at the LRH. Waterborne-diseases are on the rise in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

This increase has resulted from the haphazard growth of the city and the inability of the government to meet the growing demand for potable water.

According to Dr Ali, most hospitals in the provincial capital have seen an increase in the number of patients with typhoid, Hepatitis A and cholera all waterborne diseases.
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Health experts say poor quality drinking water remains the leading cause of child mortality in Pakistan.

A report by Nature , a local non-government organisation (NGO), says contaminated water accounts for about 250,000 child deaths annually. These numbers are difficult to verify but the United Nations Children s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that almost 60 percent of all child deaths in the country are caused by impure drinking water.

Children and women in rural areas are the main victims because they largely stay home and are ignorant of the dangers of drinking polluted water.

Jehangir Shah, chief scientific officer at the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, says poor water supply and sanitation infrastructure are the main reasons for outbreaks of water-related ailments in the NWFP.

Leaking drinking water pipes pass close to the sewerage lines in all parts of Peshawar, says Shah. When these pipes are empty, water from the sewerage is sucked in. He added that the city s drinking water also has high levels of nitrates, heavy metals and suspended particles.

Poor maintenance of the drinking water systems throughout Pakistan are reasons for epidemic outbreaks of water-borne diseases. One outbreak in the south-eastern city of Hyderabad, last year, killed 13 people, including children.

The Pakistan government has plans to provide safe drinking water to all its 150 million citizens by 2007 its Millennium Development Goal.

But attaining that goal is easier said than done because nearly half of the population has little or no access to safe drinking water. Estimates say almost 90 percent of Pakistani villagers do not have access to clean water and the situation is not much better in the urban areas.

The resource crunch is the major problem, our main supply lines cover the city but we need funds to build secondary and tertiary connections, said Tariq Mehmood, general manger of the City Development and Municipal Department.

We ask the federal government for funds to build water supply and sanitation infrastructure every year, but have not received any money so far, he added.

Experts say technical fixes alone may not solve the problem of polluted water. Fida Khan, professor of physical chemistry at the University of Peshawar says one sure way to reduce waterborne diseases is to replace old and leaky pipes with new ones.

Khan says rooftop water tanks are not cleaned properly allowing bacterial growth and accumulation of other pollutants. Untreated effluents and organic matter also pollute the water table from where the supply is pumped.

The Environmental Protection Agency in the province says it is working on a comprehensive plan to meet the potable water demand.

The United Nations is celebrating World Water Day on Mar. 22, but here we are still struggling to provide safe drinking water to our people, says Bilal Noureen, a consumer rights activist in Islamabad, Pakistan s capital.

Noting that the Water Day celebration theme this year is Water and Culture, Noureen said: We need to change the culture of (supplying) unfit water.

(* This story was produced for the Asia Water Wire, a series of features on water and development in the region coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific)