Jesus healed disease. Let’s help prevent it.
By Susan K Barnett
“Cure the sick who are there” [Luke 10:9] Jesus told his disciples, and 41 different gospel stories tell of physical or mental healing—from blindness, deafness, and leprosy to disabilities. That mercy and healing should be available to everyone is an invaluable lesson the CCIH community carries forward today.
Yet from the smallest healthcare post to large scale hospitals, something so obviously needed for effective and dignified care remains missing.
Inside healthcare facilities, diseases and suffering that is preventable continue to plague patients and workers and pose particular danger in the earliest days of every newborn. Without access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), a terribly high price is paid in lives, money, working conditions, and increasingly in antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
WASH remains appallingly lacking, especially across the 46 least developed countries where 50 percent of healthcare facilities lack basic water services, 79 percent lack sanitation services, 68 percent lack basic hygiene services like handwashing, and 66 percent lack basic waste management. When WaterAid America looked at seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where it works (Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia,) it found preventable infections acquired inside healthcare facilities, like sepsis and pneumonia, took 275,000 lives and cost a “staggering” $8.4 billion in 2022. $8.4 billion would provide universal, basic WASH services in the tens of thousands of healthcare facilities where it’s lacking. Without adequate WASH, healthcare providers are left with no choice but to overuse antibiotics to try to prevent contagious infections from spreading.
The World Health Organization calls AMR “one of the top global public health and development threats.”
A grim list of increasingly drug-resistant diseases due to the overuse of antibiotics includes tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, MRSA, pneumonia, gonorrhea, and HIV-1. Drug-resistant diseases cause longer and more complicated illnesses, more doctor visits, the need for stronger and more expensive drugs, and tragically, more suffering and more deaths. The growing global AMR crisis was responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to nearly five million deaths.
Then when you look where the highest rates of infection occur, it’s no surprise they prey on the most vulnerable—patients in intensive care, neo-natal intensive care, and pediatrics.
AMR also spreads between microorganisms. Using antimicrobials in any one sector (human health, aquaculture, animal and crop agriculture) can result in unintended exposure in other sectors. AMR undermines not only human health, but also animal health, crop health, and ecosystem health. And it threatens the global economy. The World Bank estimates $1 trillion in additional healthcare costs by 2050, and $1-$3.4 trillion gross domestic product (GDP) losses per year by 2030 due to AMR.
Further complicating matters, pharmaceutical companies have continually withdrawn from developing traditional antibiotics. A new class of antibiotics is now being tested, but it’s far from market. Even if approved, these must be used carefully otherwise overuse puts us right back where we started. If we don’t take global action to prevent infections, the unfathomable could happen: We could return to the days before antibiotics.
Of course, none of this suffering need be inevitable and prevention is the key. Because every infection prevented is one that needs no treatment. This problem is solvable and it’s becoming increasingly clear it’s the healthcare sector, which lives this WASH crisis every day, that must push for the solutions. Because the CCIH global community is committed to preventing suffering and improving health outcomes, and because up to 50 percent of healthcare facilities in some countries are faith-based, few communities are better positioned to accelerate disease prevention.
CCIH members might find inspiration and partners in recent initiatives.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development launched a landmark pilot project to get WASH into 150 healthcare facilities in 23 countries. (You can read my story about this Vatican initiative here and check back here in late September for an update.) From 2020 to 2022, CCIH participated in a USAID project to provide WASH assistance to clusters of healthcare facilities in five countries during COVID. (You can read that study here.)
This September offers a critical WASH advocacy opportunity. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will host a high-level meeting focused on antibiotic resistance, the first in eight years. Eight years ago, more than 150 countries agreed to draw up action plans, but many plans have not been adequately funded and implemented. In addition, efforts to curtail AMR tend to focus on treatment and neglect critical prevention efforts, like WASH. Which brings me to an important UNGA Resolution—unanimously signed by all countries at the highest levels—to bring WASH into every healthcare facility. This resolution is a valuable advocacy tool CCIH members can put to good use. Here’s a user-friendly 2-pager to help healthcare advocates engage in effective and unrelenting WASH advocacy.
WASH really must become a priority for anyone called to help “the least of these.” While not a simple undertaking, the opportunity to “cure the sick who are there,” curtail suffering, and see the worth and dignity of a person at their most vulnerable, is as great as the need. CCIH members can take on WASH advocacy. CCIH members can coordinate multi-sector health, WASH and development partners in WASH advocacy. CCIH members can organize faith communities to help drive demand. CCIH members can target government officials for policy and budgetary support. Your voices really make a difference and they’re greatly needed.
About the author: Susan K. Barnett is founder of Faiths for Safe Water which advocates for underrepresented issues of global water health and security. She was an award-winning journalist with the network newsmagazines PrimeTime Live, 20/20 (ABC News) and Dateline NBC. She now leads Cause Communications. For more, see Faiths for Safe Water.
Photo at top: Daughter of Charity, Sr. Augustina, is thrilled now that her entire staff and patients can consistently wash their hands! A new groundwater well at the St. Catherine’s Hospital and Maternity in Ondo State, Nigeria, means safe water is always available for handwashing and much more. Credit: Daughters of Charity, Nigeria
One Comment
Sr Mary Louise Stubbs
on August 20, 2024 at 2:43 pm
This is a great article! It links together, into a causal chain, those problems and concerns that people often see as separate issues