Working in the new media/social media/political spaces, there are a lot of wonderful clients and projects I have had the honor to work with and for. Usually I tweet about the ones I think my friends might enjoy getting involved with and, on occasion, I hop over to the blog when more than 140 characters are needed to explain what we have cooking.

In the spirit of needing a little more space to share, I am excited to have the opportunity to sit down and write about a project that I have been working on with Andre Blackman — longtime friend and colleague — at New Media Strategies: The 100th Anniversary of Safe Water.

As a health blogger, Andre hits on some great notes and resources, so I will let him do most of the talking there. In terms of my personal fascination with the project, I come at it from two angles:

  1. The humanitarian angle
  2. The scientific angle

In terms of #1, the United States is mostly covered. We are able to chlorinate/disinfect affected water supplies during natural disasters and make available affordable water treatment options at the city and individual levels. There are still areas in which improvements can be made, but right now, the only thing really threatening our clean water are the folks not using science, but rather, personal agendas and faulty thinking. On that note, Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has a great piece over at Huffington Post that puts this into perspective:

“But it’s ironic in the extreme that, as we mark the 100th anniversary of drinking water chlorination, my old organization and other activist groups aligned with it continue to oppose this most important public health achievement.

Activist organizations like Greenpeace have access to a full century of observations on the results of water chlorination in the US, all the way back to September 26, 1908 when Jersey City, NJ became the first US city to chlorinate its public water supply.

[…]

Thankfully from the perspective of human health, chlorination of water supplies spread rapidly. Today, chlorination is the overwhelming choice for treating public water systems.

The results are clear. This widespread adoption of chlorine disinfection across the U.S. has had very important results. Waterborne diseases like typhoid, Hepatitis A and cholera that once killed thousands of Americans each year have been virtually eliminated. Typhoid fever cases fell by more than 99 percent between 1900 and 1960. Related childhood mortality fell dramatically. And average life expectancy rose from 47 years in 1900 to nearly 78 years in 2006.”

With this in mind, I want to turn to the problems and challenges facing the rest of the world. Just last Thursday, I was reading in the UK’s Independent:

“A deadly outbreak of cholera in Iraq is being blamed on a scandal involving corrupt officials who failed to sterilise the local drinking water because they were bribed to buy chlorine from Iran that was long past its expiration date.”

Corruption and unsafe water could not be further from the true goals of having a healthy and vibrant democracy, but Iraq is not the only country challenged by the need for clean, safe drinking water. In fact, According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water (that’s about 1/7th of the world’s population). Unsafe water and inadequate sanitation kills nearly two million people each year, mostly children under the age of five.

The American Chemistry Council has a microsite set up that not only provides more facts, but also allows you to make an IMMEDIATE IMPACT. Participate in their quiz about safe water and donate liters upon liters of safe, clean drinking water to the chlorination project in West Africa. To date: 1,068,500 liters have been donated (that is over 4 million glasses of water, FWIW).

Unlike many more complicated world health issues (e.g., AIDS) and global conflicts (e.g., Darfur, Iraq, Isreal/Palestine) the solution is as accessible as it is affordable; easy as it is uncontroversial. Chlorine. Yep, one of the 8 building blocks of life can not only disinfect original water sources, but it can also stay in the water and fight off bacteria that it encounters whilst traveling through our pipes (or water jugs, or whatever your water travels in before it gets to you).

Here is a great video that gives you an overview of the history of chlorine’s role in eliminating water-borne illnesses of Typhoid and Cholera.

In terms of the science and the progress, these illustrations below tell the story: THANKFULLY FOR THOSE OF US IN THE U.S., DISEASES LIKE TYPHOID AND CHOLERA CAN ONLY BE CAUGHT WHEN PLAYING A THROW-BACK-GAME OF OREGON TRAIL.THE PROCESS:

  1. Coagulation
  2. Sedimentation
  3. Filtration
  4. Disinfection

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TGFC (Thank Goodness For Chlorine):

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