"A surprising 20 million people in the European Union do not have access to decent toilets and suffer from a lack of hygiene, posing serious health risks, experts meeting at World Water Week in Stockholm said. "People think that in countries so bright, so rich, they don't have this kind of problem," Sascha Gabizon, the head of the non-governmental organisation Women in Europe for a Common Future and one of 2,500 water and sanitation experts attending the forum, told AFP. "The situation is not widely known among politicians in Brussels," she said. Countries from the former Eastern bloc which recently joined the EU are those most concerned but there are also isolated locations in western Europe, she said, citing France and Ireland as examples. In Bulgaria, 42 percent of the population lives in rural zones where only two percent of households are connected to a sewage system. In Romania, 10 million people live without access to pipes, and in the countryside, only 15 percent of residents have running water."
(Yahoo News, 21 August) RD
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