Is the water making you ill?
John Birchall
21 Oct 2008
John Birchall examines the link between environment and disease in Africa - and how contaminated water, air pollution, pesticides and urbanisation contribute to ill health.
Environment-Related Disease in Africa
The continent of Africa is particularly vulnerable to diseases related to the environment.
This includes conditions caused by contaminated water, air pollution, exposure to farmers’ pesticides and the increasing rate of urbanisation.
Environmentally-related conditions account for almost a quarter of all deaths in Africa and as the environment changes there could be new affects on health.
The World Health Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme have joined forces in the hope of heading off some of these problems, bringing African government officials together in a recent conference in Gabon.
Too many deaths
Diseases caused by environmental change are responsible for too many deaths in Africa.
In 2002 alone, unsafe water, pollution, poor sanitation, inadequate waste disposal, insufficient disease vector control and exposure to chemicals claimed about 2.4 million lives.
In a bid to address this challenge, the First Inter-Ministerial Conference on Health and Environment in Africa was held in Libreville, Gabon from 26 to 29 August under the slogan "Health security through healthy environments".
Jointly organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and hosted by the Government of Gabon, the conference attracted delegates including Health Ministers, Ministers of Environment, high-level experts, academics, policy makers, bilateral & multilateral institutions and non-governmental organisations.
Political commitment
The conference - the first of its kind in Africa - aims to secure political commitment for an integrated approach to policy and the institutional and investment changes required to reduce environmental threats to health.
Angela Cropper, UNEP's Deputy Executive Director said: "While our knowledge has been increasing about how ecosystems and species and the quality of the environment relate to human health, there is a lag in concerted policy and action to address this relationship.
"Bringing together Ministers of Environment and Health in this Conference is an opportunity to lay the basis for doing so in and on behalf of the continent of Africa. We need to make sure that this partnership between WHO and UNEP endures and gets stronger, in order for the United Nations System to offer to Africa the quality of technical and policy support which will be needed."
Links between health and environment
The Conference will explore the links between health and environment. It intends to build a strategic health and environment alliance that will influence development policies at the macro-economic and sectoral levels, impact on existing investment frameworks and resource allocation, and lead to tangible outcomes in the short and medium terms.
The findings of this important conference can be viewed at the following addresses.
http://www.unep.org/health-env/pdfs/Media_FactFigures.pdf
This pdf document includes some interesting data on Africa and the link between the environment and health
http://www.unep.org/health-env/pdfs/Outcome-Conference.pdf
This pdf document contains the recommendations of the meeting and ways in which they government and other organisations need to react to reduce the health problems associate with environmental issues.
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