By Xinhua
Bali (Indonesia) : More than 200,000 children in East Asia die every year of water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, half of them in Indonesia, a UN official said here Tuesday.
Almud Weitz, regional team leader of the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme in East Asia and the Pacific, said that the diseases were caused by poor sanitation.
“The number of children die per year is about 200,000 in east Asia. That is a lot. Over 100,000 of them are in Indonesia,” she said at a Media Workshop here.
According to Weitz, the fatality related with the lack of access to sanitation, which affects 800 million to one billion people in the region.
The countries, which signed the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), have agreed to halve the number of people who do not get access to sanitation by 2015, she said.
However, the UN official said that basically the sanitation statistic in East Asia, including Indonesia, was not so bad to start for improvement, compared with other region.
Indonesia is one the four most populated countries in the world, with over 240 million population.