HEALTH ECONOMICS ASIGNMENT PDF

INTRODUCTION

Sanitation is an intervention involving behavior and facilities aiming at interrupting the disease cycle.

Sanitation should provide a safe and hygienic environment.

“Access to improved sanitation” is a measurable monitoring parameter based on the hygienic quality of
sanitation technologies.

WHO defines sanitation as group of methods to collect human excreta and urine as well as community
waste waters in a hygienic way, where human and community health is not altered.

Sanitation methods aim to decrease spreading of diseases by adequate waste water, excreta and other
waste treatment, proper handling of water and food and by restricting the occurrence of causes of
diseases.

Sanitation is a system to increase and maintain healthy life and environment. Its purpose is also to
assure people enough clean water for washing and drinking purposes. Typically health and hygiene
education is connected to sanitation in order to make people recognize where health problems originate
and how to better sanitation by their own actions. Essential part of sanitation is building and
maintenance education on sewerage systems, wash up and toilet facilities.

In defining United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) two terms are used in sanitation:

 Improved sanitation or

 Basic sanitation

Basic sanitation was defined in UN’s Sustainable Development consists of:

• Development and implementation of efficient household sanitation systems

• Improvement of sanitation in public institutions, especially in schools

• Promotion of safe hygiene practices

• Promotion of education and outreach focused on children, as agents of behavioral change

• Promotion of affordable and socially and culturally acceptable technologies and practice

• Development of innovative financing and partnership mechanisms

• Integration of sanitation into water resources management strategies in a manner which does not
have negative impact on the environment

Goal 7
Ensure environmental sustainability

• Integrate sustainable development principles into country policies and programs and reverse the loss
of environmental resources

• Halve the proportion of people suffering the lack of access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
by 2015

The term “environmental sanitation” is used to cover the wider concept of controlling all the factors in
the physical environment, which may have deleterious impacts on human health and well-being.

In developing countries, it normally includes drainage, solid waste management and vector control, in
addition to the activities covered by the definition of sanitation.

A sanitation system must:

Protect and promote health – it should keep disease-carrying waste and insects away from people, both
at the site of the toilet, in nearby homes and in the neighboring environment.

Protect the environment – avoid air, soil, water pollution, return nutrients/resources to the soil, and
conserve water and energy.

According to present knowledge sanitation projects usually account to better health effects than mere
water projects (depending largely on the beginning situation in the target country). However amounts of
sanitation projects have not been as great as the amount of water projects. There are many reasons for
this situation.

Sanitation issues are often found difficult to solve especially due to strong prejudices, beliefs and other
cultural matters. Water is often experienced as condition of life, what it certainly is, but sanitation is
seen as inevitable burden. Sanitation solutions can be very expensive and technically hard to handle.
Especially when considering water latrines of the developed countries with costly sewerage systems and
waste water treatment plants.

Therefore many projects have eventually failed to come true. The governments of the target countries
usually have more important priorities than safeguarding the toilet services to the inhabitants and for
that the importance of the hygiene aspects is not recognized.

Therefore, I strongly agree that issues environmental sanitation and hygiene got high priorities in
Ethiopia to intervene.