Water and Environmental Health
The water resources management goal for human health has two dimensions. One is to deliver a clean and adequate water supply, sanitation services, and improved hygiene practices as a package, while ensuring long-term availability of sufficient water quality and quantity. Packaging these activities helps ensure that health objectives will be attained, while at the same time protecting watersheds critical to sustainable supply.
The second human health goal is to ensure that water resources management activities are designed to minimize external impacts on health, such as the spread of mosquito breeding sites due to inadequate drainage. This objective requires effective management of other issues beyond the scope of water resources management, including solid waste management, vector control, livestock management, and careful control of other aspects of the human-built environment.
Of growing concern is the contamination of drinking water with a variety of human-made and naturally occurring chemicals and heavy metals. One group of chemicals has been linked to genetic, reproductive, and behavioral abnormalities in humans and wildlife. These chemicals are now widely found in well water, lakes, and oceans, and in some areas have contaminated both food supplies and drinking water. Heavy metal contamination is of considerable local concern in various locations.
For example, in Bangladesh, India, and Chile, naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater, exacerbated by aquifer drawdown, is responsible for a wide range of serious health effects stemming from chronic overexposure through drinking water. Meanwhile, exposure to mercury and cyanide from mining discharges to water bodies is a serious but often unrecognized health problem to residents downstream of such operations.
All of these problems — insufficient quantity of water, poor water quality, inadequate sanitation, and inadequate personal hygiene practices — are compounded for the poor who most often are found settled in low-lying, flood-prone, or swampy land with poor drainage and sanitation conditions.
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