8 July 2017 – As South Sudan enters its sixth year of independence, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is calling the situation in the country “a catastrophe for children” and cautioned that they are being denied a childhood in nearly all aspects of their lives. “A country’s independence day should be celebrated. However, today in South Sudan, there will be no celebration for the millions of children caught up in this conflict,” said Mahimbo Mdoe, UNICEF’s Representative in South Sudan, on the occasion of South Sudan’s Independence Day on 9 July. He noted that children in South Sudan are suffering “unthinkable hardships and setbacks” in their education, nutrition, health and other rights. “In nearly all aspects of…

Yemen’s Worsening Cholera Epidemic.
That is more than the total number of cholera deaths reported to the World Health Organization worldwide in 2015.
The bombing campaign has wrecked roads, bridges, and ports, damaged water treatment plants, and destroyed or damaged many hospitals and clinics.
The coalition blockade has deprived the civilian population of sufficient food and medicine.
The Hadi government moved the central bank that had until then been paying the salaries of government employees in rebel-held areas, and it did this despite numerous warnings that it would have a devastating effect on the population.
The report acknowledges some of this, but doesn’t really explain why 17 million Yemenis don’t have enough food or who was responsible for causing the halt in paying government salaries.
The average reader would have no way of knowing that these were the results of deliberate decisions by the governments supported by the U.S. Wael Ibrahim gives his account of what is happening in Yemen: Life for my friends and colleagues is a daily struggle.
Civil servants haven’t been paid in more than six months.
There are 20 million people needing help in a population of 27 million people.
Widespread malnutrition makes the population much more vulnerable to disease, and that in turn makes it more difficult to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

320 million Indians still lack access to toilet.
Nearly three years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), a nation-wide campaign to raise awareness about cleanliness, only five States have declared themselves open defecation-free (ODF) so far.
The five States are Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Uttarakhand and Haryana.
While there were 550 million people who lacked access to toilets at the beginning of the programme, the number now stands at 320 million, as per data released by the government last month.
Adverse effects Lack of access to proper sanitation has high health and economic costs associated with it: diarrhoea kills 1,00,000 children every year in India, which is metaphorically equivalent to two jumbo jet crashes every day.
It also leads to physical and cognitive stunting among children, which results in a less productive workforce.
Overall, the lack of sanitation costs India 6% of its GDP every year, Parameswaran Iyer, Secretary, Union Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, said on Friday.
The Centre can only provide technical, capacity and policy support.
He added that the cultural diversity of the country, scarcity of water, limited role of women, and the stigma associated with pit-emptying remain major challenges in expanding the programme.
The prominent among them is conflicting data on toilet coverage.

CGWB undertaking survey to ascertain chemical contents in ground water Saturday, 08 July, 2017, 08 : 00 AM [IST] Our Bureau, New Delhi The Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), under the ministry of water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation, is undertaking a massive arsenic and fluoride survey all over the country to ascertain their chemical contents in the ground water for potable purposes by digging wells in almost 21 states in which patchy reports have surfaced for their chemical presence in such water.
“CGWB is concentrating on a survey in such states as West Bengal, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and the like, as in those 21 states, the excessive use of fertilisers has led to the accumulation of arsenic and fluorides immediately beneath the surface in the last couple of decades, filling their ground water with these dangerous and injurious chemicals,” Saha said.
He added, “The focus of the survey would be to dig wells deeper below the surface of 300m in which possibilities of these chemicals hardly exist as of now, and the dug up wells would be handed over to the states concerned for necessary water supply for drinking purposes.” Meanwhile, a report, jointly prepared by the PHD Chamber and Water Aid, was also released on the occasion.
It stressed that the challenging task at the hand of water managers remained to ensure adequate access to water resources without undue environmental degradation.
It warned that India would become a water-stressed nation by 2020, keeping in view the fact that the average availability of water was reducing steadily with the growing population.
Therefore, they suggested a way forward for improving water accessibility with an integrated approach of various government departments responsible for this task, pointing out that water had been an issue in India that had been dealt with by policy makers in isolation.
They emphasised that a policy was urgently needed to regulate water consumption by all stakeholders.
The Chamber recommended that a political consensus needed to be created for the judicious use of water and recycling technologies needed to be brought from advanced nations such as Israel and the like to India for the intended purposes.
It was felt that 85 per cent of India’s drinking water needs were fulfilled by aquifers and 62 million people were suffering from various levels of fluorosis.
Out of the total 17,13,303 water habitations in India, 1,76,177 were found to be contaminated.

Rather, East, whose district encompasses the small towns of Avenal and Kettleman City on the San Joaquin Valley’s west side, is worried about the safety of the water that the 2,700 students in his school district are being given to drink.
But in the San Joaquin Valley and other rural regions of California, residents either rely on private wells or small districts that lack the funds and infrastructure to treat contaminated drinking water.
In 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency cited Arvin Community Services District, which provides drinking water for the city and schools, for exceeding the maximum contaminant level for arsenic.
While the water district looked for new sources of clean water for the community, the school districts worked with the state and local non-profits to find an interim solution—point-of-use filters that can be hooked up to water sources like drinking fountains or sinks to remove contaminants such as arsenic and lead.
Dave Wallis, the technical services program manager at RCAC, says the group has helped install more than 170 filters in the Arvin area since 2015, including in six schools in three local school districts that serve nearly 6,000 students.
But safe water at schools is only part of the issue for kids in Arvin.
Since then, student attendance in Arvin’s schools has gone up, McClean says, and she believes annual physical fitness test results for students have also improved as fewer students have been drinking only sodas and more have begun drinking water on a regular basis.
For years, locals in Avenal have shied away from tap water—even before they knew about unsafe levels of disinfectant byproducts—bemoaning its taste and its rusty appearance, and digging into what little money they had to buy five-gallon jugs of bottled water, according to East.
Although food in Avenal schools is still cooked in the cafeteria with bottled water, over the past year, using grant money provided by a local agricultural produce company—the Wonderful Company—schools have installed point-of-use water fountains.
Despite all the investments in safe water systems, he prefers the taste of bottled water, and he still fears the contaminants in local tap water.

Residents make pitch to keep Ancaster artesian well open.
Ancaster councillor Lloyd Ferguson will continue to gather information on a new standard for arsenic in drinking water that could force the closure of Ancaster’s artesian well.
Hamilton Conservation Authority staff and the city’s health department are recommending the well’s closure because the water’s typical arsenic levels of 17 to 23 parts per million exceed the new provincial limit of 10.
“We’re going to take all the information from the community, have (conservation authority staff) correlate it, go see the medical officer of health, and say, ‘Is this accurate?’” said Ferguson.
I would love to have a big picture of red herring in the middle of this (my presentation).
The well, on Sulphur Springs Road, provided the former town of Ancaster with drinking water from about 1965 to the mid-1970s, when the area was converted to the current treated municipal water supply.
“I would love to have a big picture of red herring in the middle of this (my presentation),” she said.
Davis, a well-user for 10 years, also questioned whether any level of government could enforce a standard.
According to the World Health Organization, she said, no authority has the right to legally enforce a guideline, and access to drinking water is more important than quality.
They go through up to 10 or more big jugs each week, depending on the time of year.

WHEN President Donald Trump was elected, I quit my job.
I missed America.
Most of all, I missed getting clean water from the tap.
A month ago, I returned home to Seattle blissfully ignorant of the current state of American politics and with a huge hankering for tap water.
In America, clean drinking water is often taken for granted.
Wetlands are innately a part of what makes America great — people.
Seattleites have some of the best city water in the country thanks to the 100,000 acres of protected watershed lands that naturally clean the water before it enters Seattle’s water treatment plants.
Yet Trump is giving the “go-ahead” to developers and golf course owners to contaminate more than 20,000,000 acres of America’s natural water-filtration system?
Clean water sources in America — gone.
So, explain it to me one more time: How does this make America great, again?

WHEN President Donald Trump was elected, I quit my job.
I missed America.
Most of all, I missed getting clean water from the tap.
A month ago, I returned home to Seattle blissfully ignorant of the current state of American politics and with a huge hankering for tap water.
In America, clean drinking water is often taken for granted.
Wetlands are innately a part of what makes America great — people.
Seattleites have some of the best city water in the country thanks to the 100,000 acres of protected watershed lands that naturally clean the water before it enters Seattle’s water treatment plants.
Yet Trump is giving the “go-ahead” to developers and golf course owners to contaminate more than 20,000,000 acres of America’s natural water-filtration system?
Clean water sources in America — gone.
So, explain it to me one more time: How does this make America great, again?

"Mothers in Burundi want to provide clean, safe water for their children.
How much money is she giving?
More wells would reduce the distance people have to walk to get water that is safe to drink.
UNICEF deferred that question to Parkwood Entertainment, which handles Beyonce’s publicity and is also promoting the Burundi campaign.
Beyonce’s website includes a page where people can donate to the initiative and purchase T-shirts for $30, with "proceeds to benefit UNICEF’s support of Burundi."
It’s also unclear what Beyonce has any expectations from the public beyond making a donation or buying a T-shirt.
Stern of UNICEF counters that Beyonce’s representatives at Parkwood were very engaged in discussing UNICEF’s plans to carry out this work in Burundi.
Ivy McGregor, director of philanthropy and corporate relations at Parkwood, was part of a Parkwood team that traveled to Burundi in April to plan for the new initiative.
We asked one question: How can we help?"
"And there was always one resounding answer — safe, clean water."

Clean water not only saves lives through the elimination of waterborne illnesses, but also transforms the lives of women and children.
Fortunately through the support of government now more than 9000 people from the villages of Gashari, Mutuntu, and Rubengera and Bwishyura sector of Kirehe district now have access to safe water.
For residents of Bwishyura sector says that after years of suffering from skin and other diseases blamed on arsenic in ground water pumped from wells.
Rurangwa Clever, a resident of Bwishyura sector narrates, “Undoubtedly it has been a great accomplishment to bring drinkable water to so many people in such a short time, we used to walk over long distances, now we are privileged we have free time of doing other valuable businesses’ “‘We used to have to fetch water from the bore well 4km away from our home.
The daily grind made our children late for school, and we fell sick more often,’ Rurangwa Clever, a resident of Bwishyura sector recalls.
Today, Rurangwa and his family are all relieved and happy.
Thanks to the government of Rwanda.
Ndayisaba Francis, the district mayor of Kirehe said now that he is sure 9000 homes have access to clean water, he hopes no resident will suffer from water borne diseases again.
He called on residents to protect the water infrastructures so they can last.
The district board plans to extend water to more 5000 house households by next year.