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Safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene are the three most important conditions for keeping communities healthy. They contribute to the prevention and control of disease, injury, and disability. Thus to reduce the global impact of disease, we need to understand how certain underlying causes lead to disease. Many such underlying causes are often closely linked to water, sanitation, and hygiene conditions. According to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, 2.5 billion persons live without access to improved sanitation, such as a latrine, and nearly 1 billion persons lack sources of safe drinking water (1). Effective disease prevention strategies depend on addressing problems related to water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Water, sanitation, and hygiene programs align naturally with many of CDC’s Global Health Protection Goals, including
CDC’s Environmental Health Services Branch includes a Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene team that works on
Working with partner organizations, the team performs applied research to evaluate and improve the public health impact and sustainability of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions and provides technical assistance to support the development and implementation of such interventions. In the work of the Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene team, three cross-cutting principles are inherent:
CDC’s Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene team focuses on communities in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), where CDC has experience and strong partnerships. According to the Joint Monitoring Program of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, in 2004 approximately 50 million persons in LAC had no access to an improved drinking water source, and 125 million lacked sanitation services (2, 3).
In 2006, more than 1 in 4 persons (27%) of the rural population had no access to an improved drinking water source and this same percentage also contended with unimproved sanitation facilities, demonstrating a potentially receptive audience for improved sanitation. Further highlighting the need, 25% of the LAC population often does not use any type of sanitation facility, improved or unimproved (4).