BANGKOK (AP): Laos is losing nearly $200 million a year, or 5.6 percent of its gross domestic product, due to poor sanitation and the resulting disease outbreaks that come from dirty water and a lack of toilets, the World Bank said Thursday.
Guy Hutton, a senior economist with the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program, said their study found that the largest share of the $193 million in losses comes from the cost of treating 3 million cases of disease each year linked to poor sanitation as well as the 6,000 premature deaths.
Other significant costs are the expense of having to build wells and buy bottled water to insure a clean source of drinking water and the detrimental impact that piles of trash and polluted rivers have on tourism.
Hutton said in a phone interview that the report was intended to shock.
"Government officials don't necessarily react to a statement that we lose 6,000 people a year to sanitation," he said. "What we tried to do was put this into economic terms especially to non-health ministries where monetary figures say more. You are not just losing people but you are losing value. This is a crucial loss to potential development."
The Health Ministry did not respond to a request for a comment. But from accounts in a government-run newspaper, Vientiane Times, it embraced the findings and announced that it is planning to step up construction of water systems and toilets.
Laos is a one-party communist state. Many of its people live in remote villages and in mountains, making provision of basic amenities and social services difficult. Despite a major injection of foreign aid in past two decades, it remains one of the poorest countries in Asia.
Laos spends the equivalent of just 1 cent for every $4 dollars of government budget on rural sanitation, according to the World Bank. But at the same time, the World Bank notes it is making progress increasing the numbers of households with toilets from 11 percent in 1990 to 48 percent in 2006.
By 2010, the government has a goal of installing 80,000 toilets, 5,000 wells and 1,000 gravity-fed water systems. It is part of a campaign to ensure that 90 percent of the population in rural and urban areas has access to clean water by 2020.
Hutton said the increase in the numbers of toilets "was quite an achievement" but he acknowledged they need to spend more on sanitation. "Laos has a little way to go in terms of recognizing the importance of sanitation, giving it high priority in terms of funding," he said.
The Laos report was the fifth that the World Bank has done in Southeast Asia, after similar studies in Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia. It is now working on sanitation reports for India and will eventually do them in Bangladesh and Africa. (By MICHAEL CASEY/AP Environmental Writer)
