Armed Conflicts Spread Contaminated Water and Disease: Here’s How to Better Protect Civilians

Mar 17, 2023 | Mark Zeitoun and Michael Talhami
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Public health engineers, often working for humanitarian organizations all over the globe, observe a pattern as routine as it is toxic: Explosions impair electricity services, which can knock-out sewage services; raw sewage contaminates drinking water supplies; existing strains of cholera rip through society.

But gauging the real impact of attacks is tricky and requires also considering the quality of the services before the attack, as seen in the descending path of Figure 1. This “baseline resilience” of services is important, because some systems can bounce back from an attack, while others will fail. 

Over two decades after the United Nations Security Council pushed for better protection of civilians (in Resolution 1265), Resolution 2573 (which was adopted in 2021), offers a real chance for progress. In a key paragraph, the Resolution urges all parties to an armed conflict to protect civilian infrastructure, because depriving access to essential services can “compound the spread of infectious diseases.” The thousands of people experiencing debilitating effects of cholera and diarrhoea in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Ukraine and so many other places know this reality all too well.

The authors expect the conversation about the evidence base of reverberating effects of attacks on the transmission of disease to continue, and to better inform Resolution 2573’s ability to protect civilians.