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Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development

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    • Education must play a central role to meet the challenges of sustainable development.
      • The management of water, key to public hygiene and health policies, by William DAB

The management of water, key to public hygiene and health policies, by William DAB

Public hygiene methods related to water treatment have played an important role in Europe for the eradication of diseases such as typhoid fever. Nowadays, in spite of the progress made in curative medicine, it is more than ever necessary to insist on the importance of hygiene and the quality of water.

Water and public health have always been closely related. Historically, safe water was the starting point for the development of the hygiene campaigns in the mid 19th Century.

Measures of public hygiene such as the treatment of water, the protection of sources, and progress in personal hygiene, made it possible to bring about a drop from a scale of 100 in 1860, to 10 in 1920, for typhoid fever, in just sixty years.

Progress in curative medical practices and vaccines, followed by the use of antibiotics, brought a further drop down to 2 in the next forty years. In epidemiology, water played a very special role. Studying cholera epidemics in 1854, John Snow became convinced the disease was related to water - and not miasma - and he then laid down the foundations for modern epidemiology (description, test, and evaluation).

Only too rapidly, this degree of attention to the cleanliness of water abated, and progress was taken for granted. In fact, in the 20th Century, it was as though the brilliant success story of curative medicine had eclipsed hygiene, as though the individual dimension had ousted the community approach.

In Johannesburg, experts pointed out that about 180 billion dollars a year would be required to respond to the commitments of the United Nations concerning access to water and sanitation. As of now, annual expenditure in this respect amounts to about half of this sum.

The present situation can be described as requiring a merger between the hygienist approach of the 19th Century, and the medical and biomedical approaches of the 20th. These two approaches methods must be combinedlinked to achieve well-being, by combining an ever more powerful technical approach and a pedagogical approach based on social mobilisation and education. There is an obvious condition for that to happen: better scientific education.