Every year, lack of safe water and proper sanitation result in 2 million child deaths and 443 million missed school days

HALF of all hospital beds in the developing world are filled with people sick from waterborne diseases. More people die of diarrhea from unsafe water and poor sanitation than from armed conflict.

Treating drinking water costs less than one penny per family per day, and could save one million children’s lives each year.

PSI currently social markets and distributes three household water treatment products in twenty-three countries. PSI’s safe water communication strategies, which include both commercial marketing and community mobilization, generate awareness of the link between contaminated water and disease, and hence the value of disinfecting drinking water. Because fecal contamination from unwashed hands and foods can also spread disease, PSI’s communications typically combine household water treatment with promotion of supportive hygienic behaviors.

Household Water Treatment

While investments in infrastructure are essential to social and economic development, population growth, migration, war and insufficient funding make it unfeasible to reach everyone with clean, piped water in the near future.

This results in more than a billion people worldwide who still lack consistent access to safe water, and billions more than do not have safe water piped into their homes.

Most people in developing countries draw their water from a central source, such as a well, borehole, lake, or river, and therefore need to transport and store their water. Household water treatment products such as Safe Water Solution, PUR and chlorine tablets are complementary to water delivery infrastructure, which may deliver clean water to communal water points but that cannot keep water from becoming contaminated during transport and home storage.

Use of home water disinfection can be adopted quickly and inexpensively, leading to immediate health impact. Household water treatment products can also be used for treating contaminated and/or turbid water taken from rivers, streams, swamps or open wells in areas where no infrastructure exists.

PSI conducts communication campaigns to encourage proper water treatment, storage and hygiene.

Other Diarrheal Disease Control Interventions

Children often die from dehydration caused by diarrhea. In 1985, PSI began to social market oral rehydration salts (ORS). ORS is a small sachet of salt and sugar that is 95% effective in saving the lives of dehydrated children. ORS rapidly restores lost body fluids and electrolytes. PSI uses social marketing to teach caretakers about the importance of giving children with diarrhea increased fluids such as ORS, and makes ORS readily available.

The use of zinc, along with oral rehydration therapy, is promoted by UNICEF and the World Health Organization as the best way to decrease the incidence, severity and recurrence of diarrhea disease. In Cambodia in 2006, PSI started marketing zinc supplements alongside ORS. Through the USAID-funded POUZN mechanism, PSI/Nepal in collaboration with the Nepal Ministry of Heath and Population’s Child Health Division launched pediatric zinc for the treatment of diarrhea in young children in the three districts of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur in 2007.

Read more about POUZN.

Child Nutrition

Billions of children, mostly in developing countries, are disabled by micronutrient deficiencies. Iron, Vitamin A, and iodine deficiencies are the most common form of micronutrient malnutrition and of greatest public health concern worldwide.

Solving micronutrient malnutrition is an important step in protecting populations and is working to reduce the health and social costs of micronutrient deficiencies through the social marketing of vitamin supplements and other products currently in development.

• Sprinkles: Sprinkles flakes are mixed into children’s porridge or milk to prevent iron deficiency that can lead to impairment of cognitive growth.

• De-worming: An estimated 300 million people, 50% of them school-aged children, are severely ill or suffer from micronutrient deficiencies due to worm infections. A single-dose tablet taken twice per year is a highly cost-effective intervention.