15-4
Before telling people to boil water, be sure to consider the cost to them. Families
may be poor and resources limited. To boil water costs firewood (or cow dung),
time, energy, and often money. If a poor family has to spend part of its limited
food money on firewood, then boiling the water may actually harm their children’s
health!
Good nutrition does far more to prevent
infection than does boiling of drinking water.
Also consider people’s need to live in balance with nature. In many areas, the
gathering of firewood is turning forests into deserts. Where forests are destroyed,
there is less rainfall, causing drought and crop failure. In these areas, advice on
ways to cook with less firewood (such as by using special mud stoves) may be
most important to long-term health. Advice to “boil your water” could be a slow
death sentence, to both the land and the people.
Fortunately, in such circumstances, villagers tend to be more realistic than health
advisers. They simply do not follow the advice. Unfortunately, the villagers are often
scolded or made to feel backward for not doing so.
Boiling water for Rehydration Drink: Most dangerous of all is to instruct people
to boil water when preparing Rehydration Drink for children with diarrhea (see
Special Drink, p. 24-20). Telling mothers to boil the water for Rehydration
Drink may actually cause more infant deaths. The reasons are these:
• Boiling water means extra work and extra cost.
• Some mothers will simply not make the Special
Drink if told they must boil the water for it.
• Boiling takes time. Cooling takes still more
time. But a baby with diarrhea needs liquid
immediately! The delay caused by boiling
increases the danger of dehydration. This
increased risk outweighs the germ-killing
benefits. In any case, the baby with diarrhea
probably already has the infection that the
unboiled water might give him.
Instead of telling people to boil the water when
preparing Special Drink, it is better to advise them,
“Prepare it fast! Use the cleanest water you have.
If you have water that has already been boiled, that
is best. But DON’T LOSE TIME BOILING WATER
WHEN YOUR BABY HAS DIARRHEA!”
Because preparing Rehydration Drink takes
time, it is also wise to advise mothers of children
with diarrhea to give plain water at once, and
until the drink is prepared.
Note: This advice about boiling, like all advice, needs to be adapted to local conditions. In
places where people get their water from open sewers, for example, boiling water may be
an essential, even life-saving measure. Where firewood is scarce, you can put water (or
Rehydration Drink) in small, tightly sealed plastic bags or clear plastic or glass bottles. Leave
these in the sun all day. This will kill all or most of the germs.