A quarter of the world's health facilities lack basic water services, impacting 2 billion people, the United Nations said, warning that unhygienic conditions could fuel the global rise of deadly superbugs.
In the poorest countries, about half of facilities do not have basic water services - meaning water delivered by pipes or boreholes that protect it from faeces - putting birthing mothers and newborns in particular danger.
"A health care facility without water is not really a health care facility," said UNICEF statistician Tom Slaymaker. "Sick people shed a lot more pathogens in their faeces, and without toilets, staff, patients – this includes mothers and babies – are at a much greater risk of diseases caused and spread through human waste."
WHO and UNICEF said more than 1 million deaths a year were associated with unclean births, and 15 percent of all patients attending a health facility developed infections.
"Hospitals are not necessarily points of care where you can heal, but points of almost infection. We are very alarmed by this," WHO public health co-ordinator Bruce Gordon told a media briefing.
Worldwide, nearly 900 million people have no water at all at their local health facility or have to use unprotected wells or springs. One in five facilities also lack toilets, impacting about 1.5 billion people. Good water and sanitation services were crucial to reducing the spread of antimicrobial resistance, one of the greatest global health threats.
International charity WaterAid said rising rates of superbugs had been linked to poor sanitary conditions in health facilities which lead to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics.
Helen Hamilton, WaterAid policy analyst, said the data revealed the "often-deplorable conditions" in which health workers were trying to help patients.
"The battle to save lives, and to slow the rise of deadly superbugs which threaten us all, cannot be won as long as these dedicated frontline staff are denied ... the fundamentals of health care," she said.
West Africa had some of the lowest rates of access to water and sanitation. WaterAid said this was alarming given that a lack of clean water and good hygiene had contributed to the spread of the world's worst Ebola outbreak in the region, which killed more than 11,300 people between 2013 and 2016.
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