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Abstract
On Maple Street, the drains clog every monsoon, and for three days the children play barefoot in water that is equal parts rain and runoff. Old Mrs. Okafor keeps her windows shut against the smell from the illegal dump at the end of the lane, yet her asthma still worsens each summer. Down the road, the Kowalski family boils every drop of drinking water because the municipal pipes leak somewhere nobody has bothered to find. Nothing on Maple Street looks like an emergency. There are no ambulances, no quarantines, no headlines — only a slow, ordinary accumulation of coughs, skin rashes, fevers, and missed school days that everyone has quietly accepted as “just how it is here.”
References
World Health Organization. Environmental Health: Fact Sheets and Guidelines. Geneva: WHO. www.who.int/health-topics/environmental-health
World Health Organization & UNICEF. Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP Reports).
Prüss-Ustün, A., et al. Burden of disease from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. Geneva: WHO, 2019.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Environmental Health Topics: Water, Air, and Food Safety. www.cdc.gov
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). World Environment Day Community Clean-Up Campaigns, 2023.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
