8 Seconds

Every eight seconds, a child dies for drinking contaminated water. According to UNICEF, polluted water claims the lives of 1.5 million children every year due to water-borne diseases, which gives us a total of 5 million people who die every year just because of drinking water – water, that’s supposedly meant to help us, not kill us.

Fresh water is a valuable commodity which must be well managed and conserved. Drinking water is a basic necessity for human lives. But if the water we drink isn’t clean, it may be a cause of some serious disease. Statistics show that out of more than six billion people in the world today, an astonishing one billion have no access to clean drinking water.

There is a progress. Well, at least a bit. Despite this commendable progress, an estimated 425 million children under the age of 18 still don’t have access to an improved water supply, and over 980 million don’t have access to ample sanitation. But that’s not just it. Millions more have their developments disrupted and are suffering health problems like diarrhea or other water-related diseases. An estimated 11.3 billion dollars a year is needed to meet low-cost basic levels of services for both drinking water and sanitation. By the year 2015, more than 80 percent will be needed in Africa and in Asia.

Back in the 1980s (wherein the decade was declared to be 'The International Drinking Water Supply' decade), the United Nations spent around $100 billion on water supply projects. But look here: we need not spend that much, in these critical times where every peso counts. The solution is not throwing more money into more water projects that don’t even seem to have much effect; heck, we're not even sure if the allotted money goes to those projects. The real problem is the lack of sustained, effective political commitment and implementation.

Every eight seconds, there’s a child who will not live to see tomorrow and celebrate their birthday. 88% of the 1.9 million children suffer from diarrhea each year. More than 4,000 children are dying every day because of diarrhea. Do we have to wait for more children to die?
Let us remember:
A LIFE IS TAKEN EVERY EIGHT SECONDS.
We have to act now, or start counting.
8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1.

High Schooler's Water Cleaner Fights Pollution From Teflon Plant

2007 Breakthrough Awards /// The Innovators /// Next Generation Award /// Kelydra Elizabeth Welcker

By Logan Ward

Video by Virtual Dream
Video Produced by Allyson Torrisi
Photograph by Mark Asnin

Published in the November 2007 issue.


Parkersburg, W.Va., is a city of 33,000 on the Ohio River. For decades, a DuPont plant 7 miles upstream has polluted the local waters with ammonium perfluorooctanoate (APFO), a surfactant used to make Teflon. As debate raged about possible health effects, Parkersburg South High School student Kelydra Welcker, now an 18-year-old college freshman, took action. “There was little being done to discover ways to remove this chemical from the environment,” Welcker says. “I knew there had to be a solution, and I wanted to be part of it.”

She devised a simple test for the presence of the chemical in water, which involved measuring the foam on a shaken sample of boiled water. Then, using hand-me-down chemistry equipment in a makeshift lab set up in a trailer behind her house, Welcker developed a way to remove APFO from water by combining granular activated carbon, the stuff that cleans fish tanks, and electrosorption, which draws remaining APFO ions to a pair of electrodes. She has made a desktop unit for treating small quantities of domestic drinking water, and she hopes the local utility company—with assistance from DuPont—will scale up her technique to treat water on a community-wide basis.

“I hope people understand that science isn’t just people in white lab coats speaking gibberish,” says Welcker, who has been winning science awards since she was 13. “Scientists are real people who want to make a positive impact on their world.”

When people step forward to help..

This is from National Geographic under their Environment Videos.

Coastal Cleanup - Each year, hundreds of thousands of volunteers gather to clean up coastlines around the world.

Alabama Public Television: Learn Something New Everyday

This site is very useful for you to visualize concepts that we presented in our older posts. They provide videos and written explanations of their activities/experiments.

Here are some of their activities:

1. Where's the water?
2. Water Pollution
3. Bottled vs Tap, which tastes better?
4. Water Supply and Demand

Aquamergency!