EDITORIAL
People can engineer for human fulfillment If a single program to provide maximum economic, health, and social benefits had to be chosen for an underdeveloped region, that program would nearly always be to develop reliable water supplies
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n our sophisticated, affluent society we are more often troubled by problems of too much and too soon than of too little and too late. Fortunately, our too much and too soon are relatively easy to live with. But much of the rest of the world’s too little and too late are not easily ignored, and should not be easily tolerated. Take, for example, the problems of water supply in Latin America (see page 17). Whereas we in the United States are now very much concernedand rightly so-with setting water quality standards, huge areas and large populations in Latin America are concerned solely with the task of obtaining some potable water. Picture the extent and magnitude of the job to be done there. According to the World Health Organization, as recently as 1961 almost no city in Latin America had water under pressure all day, every day of the week. Or consider the tribulations of living in a town of 25,000 where water is available only in the town’s center, and there from only three small pipes which deliver water, under very low pressure, for only three hours on only three mornings of each week. Happily, new and exciting solutions and techniques to overcome these difficulties are available, or are in the process of being developed. Indeed, considerable progress has been made toward supplying potable water to Latin Americans-66% of the urban
population and 19% of the rural population are by now served by house connection or public hydrant. Yet a formidable task remains. Sewage facilities are seriously deficient-only 53 % of Latin America’s people live in houses connected to a sewage system. But in this instance, too, the Latin Americans are making progress. Learning from the difficulties of the two-organization water supply-sewage disposal system that evolved in the U.S. in the 1930’s and has persisted since then, Latin Americans are taking a combined approach-water in and sewage out as a package program. Once Latin Americans have achieved the minimal goals of an adequate water supply and an effective sewage disposal system they will be able to turn their attention, as others have started to do, to the task of letting man look on the positive side of health. It is in this added, special way that the exercises of the environment manipulators can bear their most joyous fruit. It is the reduction to practice, the translation of the philosophical into the pragmatic, that leads to the betterment of man. Health is not just the absence of disease and disability, says Surgeon General, William H. Stewart (see page 2 1 ) . The healthy man is more than “unsick”; he is strong. The truly healthful environnient is not merely safe but stimulating; it is a goal for all seasons and for all men.
Volume 2, Number 1, January (968 5
