Clean water campaign this September

Some things you just take for granted. Take clean water for instance.

Americans have been enjoying 100 years of clean drinking water that we wouldn’t know what to do without it. LIFE Magazine hailed the filtration and chlorination of water as “probably the most significant public health advancement of the millennium.” Chlorination of drinking water has helped eliminate waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid fever. With it, life expectancy almost doubled from 47 years old in 1900 to 78 in 2006.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for nations outside the USA. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, and nearly 2 million people die every year because of unsafe water.

It’s really not difficult to disinfect and safely store water in individual households, especially in places where piped water is not available. A recent study by the WHO found that household-based chlorination is the most cost-effective way to reduce these waterborne illnesses.

September 26 marks the 100 years of clean water in the US. Now, let’s make it a better world for people outside our shores too. There is something very simple we can each do:

Take the Clean Water Challenge Quiz, and the American Chemistry Council will contribute $0.20 for each correct answer, up to a total of $200,000. Twenty cents is the cost of five chlorine tablets designed to disinfect 100 liters of water. With your help, we can contribute enough to disinfect 100 million liters of household drinking water.

image: sxc