Here’s more from the Red Cross:
The most recent UNICEF data show that only 26 per cent of Cambodia’s rural population has access to adequate drinking water compared to 55 per cent of the rural population living in the world’s least developed countries. The situation is particularly bad in four remote and impoverished north-eastern provinces – Kratie, Mondulkiri, Rotanakiri and Stung Teng – where the main sources of drinking water are springs, rivers, streams and rainwater.
Slightly more than one-fifth of children under the age of five living in these provinces have diarrhoea in a given two-week period, according to the 2000 Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey. The same survey says more than 50 per cent of under-fives in the north-east have moderately or severely stunted growth, an indication of chronic, incapacitating malnutrition.
“The health status of the Cambodian children is grim. Almost one in 10 Cambodian children dies before his or her first birthday,†says Charles Lerman, regional health coordinator of the American Red Cross, which is supporting the CRC’s Community Hygiene and Water Purification (CHWP) project, along with the International Development Enterprises and the Freeman Foundation.
The locally produced ceramic water filter is part of the CHWP project, a one-year scheme that concludes in December that aims to reduce childhood illness and death from diarrhoeal disease by providing safe water containers and disseminating health and hygiene messages to communities.
The CRC is distributing one ceramic water filter to some 6,000 households in 53 villages.
The ceramic filter is a clay pot that holds approximately 10 litres, allowing a family to produce up to 30 litres a day. “It is cheap, portable, effective and can be used and maintained even by the poorest families,†Lerman says.
The CWF is impregnated with colloidal silver, which neutralises any pathogens not already captured by a clay matrix through which the water passes.
