The MDGs and the human rights to water and sanitation 2010, para. 25

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Paragraph text: Secondly, to meet human rights standards, water must be safe, that is, of such quality that it does not pose a threat to human health. Sanitation facilities must be hygienically and technically safe to use. To ensure hygiene, access to water for cleansing and hand washing is essential. While target 7.C explicitly refers to access to safe drinking water, the indicator does not measure quality directly. It is based on the assumption that improved sources are likely to provide safe water. However, this is not always the case. The drinking water obtained from many improved sources is in fact unsafe, with potentially adverse consequences for the health-related Millennium Development Goals as well as target 7.C. Simply putting a lid on the polluted water, which then counts as a protected well, does not mitigate all forms of pollution. To include an assessment of actual drinking water safety in the Joint Monitoring Programme assessments, household survey data would need to be complemented by data derived from other approaches such as periodic water quality sample surveys using field-based techniques. This is already done in Bangladesh, where a serious contamination of the groundwater with arsenic made it mandatory to monitor water quality, since many "improved" water sources were severely contaminated.

Body: Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation

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