In a small village in the Badin district, Subhan and his friends used to play cricket in a vast ground nearby. But this season’s monsoon rains have flooded the entire ground with rainwater mixed with agricultural wastewater; and what used to be a playground, has now become a swimming pond.
Even as the children enjoy their swimming in the huge pool of water, they and their parents are unaware of the disastrous consequences that this polluted water can bring to them. Already, teenaged Subhan and many of his friends are suffering from various skin diseases, with rashes and inflammation patches spread all over their bodies.
On Saturday, as countries across the globe arranged different programmes to highlight the importance of handwashing by celebrating the Global Handwashing Day-2011, most of the children in this flood-hit village are suffering from skin diseases with no doctors or a clinic to attend them in the vicinity.
As planned, the Global Handwashing Day was to revolve around activities in playgrounds, classrooms, and community and public places to drive forward the ‘handwashing with soap’ campaign and trigger a behavioural change in children on a massive scale. The Global Handwashing Day is celebrated every year on October 15 to highlight awareness on washing hands with soap as a key approach to disease prevention that can contribute to a significant decrease in child morbidity and mortality – more than 50 percent.
But for the residents of this village in Badin, using soap is entirely a new concept – as when someone falls ill and approaches a doctor, they are first prescribed by the medics to drink mineral water as medicine. Talking with Pakistan Today, Subhan’s father, Anwer, said: “Despite the passage of three months [since flooding], wastewater is running through most of the freshwater courses in our village.”
“We have no other option than to consume this water. When there is a meal on the table [in the prevalent conditions], who cares about handwashing and that too with soap,” he added. Due to unsatisfactory sanitation and no trend for handwashing, abdominal diseases among children are widespread.
According to official data compiled by international institutions, diarrhoea remains the second leading cause of death globally among children under five years of age with nearly one in five deaths – about 1.5 million each year. The data further reveals that diarrhoea kills more children than the combined toll from acquired immune deficiency syndrome, malaria and measles.
In Pakistan, more than 250,000 children die every year due to abdominal diseases. Even when most people, non-governmental organisations and even the media highlight lack of clean water, nearly one billion people across the globe lack access to safe water while 2.5 billion do not have proper sanitation facilities.
Subhan’s village, it seems, will take long time before it appears on the radar of international donors, non-profit organisations and institutions working on healthcare and child morality to be informed about how to stay away from the polluted water.
