The Importance of Clean Water

Providing clean water, keeping water clean: an integrated approach.

Millions of people, most of whom are children in developing countries, die of basic hygiene-related diseases every year. Interventions in hygiene, sanitation and water supply have been shown to control disease burden. Universal access to improved water sources and basic sanitation remains elusive but is an important long-term goal. Studies have shown that improving the microbiological quality o...

Soil Air Water CLEAN

Clean Water Act

Definition The US Congress enacted the Clean Water Act in 1972 (P.L. 92-500, the 1972 Amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act), which is the principal law dealing with polluting activity in streams, rivers, lakes, and estuaries of the USA (Copeland, 2006). The Clean Water Act established a water quality standards approach for regulating water quality, with the US Environmental Pro...

Making waves with the Clean Water Act.

LETTERS References 1. B. S. Halpern, Ecol. Appl. 13, S117 (2003). 2. Healthy Reefs Initiative, Report Card for the Mesoamerican Reef: An Evaluation of Ecosystem Health (Healthy Reefs for Healthy People, 2008); www.healthyreefs.org/Report_Card/Report_2008/Report_ 2008index.html. 3. R. H. Richmond et al., BioScience 57, 598 (2007). 4. J. R. Karr, C. O. Yoder, J. Environ. Eng. 130, 594 (2004). 5. ...

Prioritising clean water and sanitation.

Every minute, 1·1 million litres of human excrement joins the river Ganges. It is a staggering statistic but hardly surprising since some 627 million Indians practice open defecation, roughly half the country’s population, and more than half of the estimated 1 billion people around the world who defecate openly. Most of these people live in ten countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Indonesi...