Drinking Water Safety

The most efficient way to transport and deliver potable water is through pipes. Plumbing can require significant capital investment. Some systems suffer high operating costs. The cost to replace the deteriorating water and sanitation infrastructure of industrialized countries may be as high as $200 billion a year. Leakage of untreated and treated water from pipes reduces access to water. Leakage rates of 50% are not uncommon in urban systems.Because of the high initial investments, many less wealthy nations cannot afford to develop or sustain appropriate infrastructure, and as a consequence people in these areas may spend a correspondingly higher fraction of their income on water 2003 statistics from El Salvador, for example, indicate that the poorest 20% of households spend more than 10% of their total income on water. In the United Kingdom authorities define spending of more than 3% of one's income on water as a hardship.The Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water between 1990 and 2015 will probably be reached. Some countries though still face enormous challenges.Rural communities are the furthest from meeting the 2015 MDGs drinking water target. Globally only 27% of the rural population has water piped directly to their home and 24% rely on unimproved sources. Of the 884 million people without access to an improved water source, 746 million people (84%) live in rural areas. Sub-Saharan Africa has made the least progress in improved water sources since 1990, improving only 9% to 2006. In contrast, the Eastern Asian region saw a dramatic drop from 45% to 9% reliance on unimproved water in the same time period.

Percentage of population with access to safe drinking water (2000) ^[19]

Country	%		Country	%		Country	%		Country	%		Country	%
Albania	97		Algeria	89		Azerbaijan	78		Brazil	87		Chile	93
China	75		Cuba	91		Egypt	97		India	84		Indonesia	78
Iran	92		Iraq	85		Kenya	57		North Korea	100		South Korea	92
Mexico	88		Moldova	92		Morocco	80		Mozambique	57		Pakistan	90
Peru	80		Philippines	86		Singapore	100		South Africa	86		Sudan	67
Syria	80		Turkey	82		Uganda	52		Venezuela	83		Zimbabwe	83
Note: All industrialized countries  with data available are at 100%.

In the U.S, the typical nonconserving single family home uses 69.3 gallons of water per capita per day. In some parts of the country there are water supplies that are dangerously low due to drought, particularly in the West and the South East region of the U.S.