WATER COALITION INTERNATIONAL

• An action-oriented nonprofit, humanitarian and education campaign

• Mobilizing poor desolate communities in the world to address their own basic water and sanitation needs.

• The vision is a world where all people have access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation; a world where no child dies from water-related disease and the community potential is greatly enhanced!

Unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation kill thousands of children every day, according to global health experts.

They described the deaths as a "silent crisis" and called for immediate action.

"There should be an outcry, for concerted efforts to confront the reality," said Dr Jamie Bartram, of the WHO (World Health Organization).

One-fifth of the people around the globe do not have access to a source of safe drinking water.

"Far more people endure the largely preventable effects of poor water supply than are affected by combined war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Bartram said.

But the researchers said realizing the goals of eradicating extreme poverty, creating primary school education and reducing child mortality would be difficult without solving the water problem.

Half of all hospital beds in the world are filled with people suffering from water-related diseases such as malaria, diarrhea and trachoma, an eye disorder, according to the report.