简体中文
UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson on Wednesday called upon the international community to "break the silence" on open defecation and aid the 2.5 billion people across the world that live without basic sanitation.
Eliasson made the statement at a press conference held at United Nation Headquarters in New York to unveil the UN global Sanitation Campaign.
"The campaign was launched to break the silence on open defecation and issue a Call to Action on Sanitation," he said.
The campaign, among other aims, urges people to "search open defecation," find out more about the issue and participate in the solutions.
It is also part of the UN efforts to focus on open defecation and how to accelerate global action to reach the sanitation targets of the anti-poverty targets called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the 2015 deadline.
The MDGs target to halve the proportion of people without access to sanitation has helped to raise the profile of the issue, and 1.8 billion people gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, but there is still far to go, notes a press release on the new initiative.
Meanwhile, the MDGs target to halve the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water has already been met.
As of now, one billion people in the world practice open defecation. This startling number translates into 15 percent of the global population.
Eliasson categorized this, as "a choice that has a terrible impact on the health of those people" and "leads to the death of thousands of children, one every two and a half minutes."
Also on Wednesday, Nicholas Alipui, the director of programs at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said that diarrhea and stunting are two major complications of open defecation.
"Stunting kills about a half a billion children every year" while diarrhea is responsible for killing three quarters of a million children under the age of five, Alipui said.
Thus,"ending open defection would contribute to a 36 percent reduction in diarrhea," he said.
