Developing countries, even today, account for 79% of
the world's population. These countries lack the advantages that
the other 21% of countries are lucky enough to have, regarding proper
water and sewer systems. The number of households with access to
water and toilets in developing countries were as low as 20% in poor
urban areas of South-east Asia. In India, only 23% of households
in India have individual piped water connections, and only 26% have
individual sanitaiton. A slightly larger percent of households
had these piped connections in Ghana. Interviews and surveys were
conducted among one thousand households in 1991, which showed that
approximately 65% of these residents relied on open waterways for
defecation, due to the lack of piped water connections. An
estimated 500,000 people defecate in the open among the many developing
countries of our world today.
We can see a significant
difference between these resources in
developing countries and those in New York City. In North
America, as a whole, 100% of the population have access to a proper
sewage connection. This figure is slightly different in Europe,
where 92% of the population has these connections as well. In
some developing countries, however, this percentage is significantly
smaller. For example, only 13% of Africans have proper access to
sewage connections.
As previously stated, an inefficient sewage
disposal system may result in several diseases, such as cholera.
In 1997, 27 developing countries reported cases of the cholera
epidemic. Among these included Africa,
which reported a total of 118, 349 cases and 5,853 deaths. In
1970 cholera invaded West Africa, which had not experienced the disease
for more than 100 years. The disease quickly spread to a number of
countries and eventually became endemic in most of the continent. In
1991 cholera struck Latin America, where it had also been absent for
more than a century. Within the year it spread to 11 countries, and
subsequently throughout the continent.
The Population and
Environment
Most of the environmental
degradation in developed countries, where
only 20 percent of the world's people live, is attributable to high
consumption patterns; each individual in an developed country exerts
more pressure on the environment than perhaps 20 to 30 people in the
less developed world. For example, consumption patterns in the United
States are indicative of the developed world's disproportionate use of
global resources. The United States, as 5 percent of the world's
population, uses an estimated 33 percent of the world's resources, and
causes an estimated 33 percent of the world's pollution. According to
one estimate, the average American uses at least 30 times the amount of
resources as a person living in India.
About 90-95% of sweage and
70% of industrial wastes are dumped
untreated into surface waters where they pollute the water supply. The
insufficient sewer systems led to stagnat and polluted waters, which is
a haven for mosquitos to proliferate. The tragic result is that this
unclesan water and poor sanitation kills 12 million people each year,
due to mosquito-borne diseases and through water contaminated by human
feces. Among these infectious diseases are yellow fever, malaria,
typhoid, and cholera.