Contamination continues to plague Yemen’s drinking water

A stew of toxins seeps into our water supply.

The health of a population is closely related to their access to safe drinking water. The dire shortage of fresh water sources in Yemen and the lack of proper sewage systems contribute to the emergence and spread of contagious diseases.  Yet the connection between water sources and water-borne diseases is not currently monitored. Less than half of the population has access to safe water and sanitation.   Only half of Yemen’s water sources are considered to be safe, according to the World Health Organization. Others either need treatment or should be completely avoided.  

Access to sanitation facilities is very limited. 45 percent of the population uses an open pit to defecate in. While 92 percent of the urban population has access to some sort of sanitation facility, such facilities are available to only 43.2 percent of the rural population.  A parliamentary report published last year report, prepared by a committee for water and environment, states that 75 percent of Yemen’s population of 20 million is threatened by water-borne diseases, due to unclean drinking water.   According to that report, 55,000 children die annually from diseases related to water pollution. The report, which warned of the increase in the usage of contaminated water, confirmed that 50 percent of childhood deaths in Yemen are due to water pollution—20 percent due to diarrhea and 30 percent due to malaria and typhoid. 

Water tanks that carry what is supposed to be clean water to houses are dirty and not fit for carrying drinking water. This puts families in a bad situation, in which they are forced either to drink the contaminated water that comes in the tanks or buy specific water for drinking, which cost too much for most Yemenis.   “It’s difficult to live in a circumstance where you feel you are pressured to buy clean water and expensive prices or risk having your family suffer from the sicknesses that erupt from drinking tap water,” said Ibtisam Ali al-Hammadi, a mother of four who found out that her continuous kidney problems were mainly due to the bad water she has been drinking her entire life. 

UNICEF engineer, Sami Abu Bakr Saeed, the general director of the Water and Environment Unit, said UNICEF would offer technical support to fight the excessive level of fluoride in water to save people, especially children, from health complications arising from too much fluoride in the water. Saeed said that he expects the problem of fluoride in drinking water to become a comprehensive problem in Yemen in the next 10 years, because of random digging for drinking water. He said some people dig to 1,000 meters in mountainous areas, where water contains high fluoride. He warned that bad effects of fluoride might be unexpected, especially on children. “Contamination is caused by human and factory waste,” particularly in the country’s major population centers, said Deputy Minister Mohammed al-Hamdi.

“When this waste is treated, some of it leaks, and causes underground water to be polluted. These treatment stations cannot provide much sanitation, given that they are very old.”   According to reports issued by the World Bank, the unregulated disposal of municipal and industrial wastewater has further served to contaminate underground water, especially in the Sana’a basin area.  In areas surrounding Taiz, 300 miles west of the capital, many people have yellow and brown teeth, which health experts blame on the dirty water in that governorate.  Shoaib Ali al-Shiabani, who lives in Taiz, complains that his four children have started having problems with their teeth. 

They have started to change colors from white to yellow at a very young age. “Even if they brush their teeth every day, they would still have a big chance of having bad colored teeth before they reach the age of twenty,” said al-Shaibani, who had brown stains spread across his teeth by the age of 20.  Unfortunately, many people cannot even differentiate between clean water and contaminated water.  The government has done very little to solve this crisis. Even officials at the Ministry of Water and Environment concede that inefficient sanitation systems have contributed to an increase in the pollution of underground water. 

Yemen is far behind other countries in the region when it comes to providing water resources to its citizens. However, Yemeni people also use less water than people in any other Arab country, according to rankings by the World Health Organization. Yemen has one of the lowest water usage rates in the world. Each person uses an average of 200 cubic meters of water per person annually, compared to the 5,000 cubic meters per person used by people in the US, the country with the highest water usage rate. It’s also lower than the regional average of 1,800 cubic meters per person per day.   Some of the most common pollutants of water are:  
• Petroleum products (oil and chemicals derived from oil are used for fuel, lubrication, plastics manufacturing)  
• Pesticides and herbicides that are used to kill unwanted plants and insects 
• Heavy metals, such as copper, lead and mercury, often used in the automobile industry 
• Excess organic matter (fertilizers, wastes, and other nutrients used to promote plant growth on farms)  
• Large amounts of sediment 
• Infectious organisms or parasites

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