P&G, SFH battle cholera in Nigeria with PUR water purifier

Safe Water for Nigerian Children, a collaborative project of leading consumer goods company, Procter & Gamble and renowned NGO, Society for Family Health (SFH) is donating 48,000 sachets of PUR, P&G’s not-for-profit purifier of water providing 480,000 litres of safe drinking water to the people of Borno, Gombe, Taraba, Yobe and Adamawa states in response to the cholera outbreak in these states.
According to the Minister of Health, Prof. Christian Onyebuchi Chukwu over 7,000 cases of cholera infection has been recorded in all the affected states since June when the alarm of the first outbreak was raised.
P&G and SFH made their donations of PUR purifier of water to the state Ministries of Health and plans to do the same in other states affected by the deadly epidemic.
Reacting to the donation, in Borno state, the Honorable Commissioner for Health, Alhaji Kazim Shettima said “cholera has become a recurring decimal in Borno state due to the lack of safe drinking water in some parts of the state. We are deeply grateful to Procter and Gamble for taking it upon themselves to make provisions for safe drinking water for the affected victims with this donation of PUR.”
Since January, 2008, the ‘Safe Water for Nigerian Children’ project has provided over 20 million litres of safe drinking water in semi-urban and rural communities in Nigeria through the use of P&G’s PUR Purifier of Water®. This project is a part of P&G Children’s' Safe Drinking Water (CSDW) program, the flagship of its corporate social responsibility platform, Live, Learn & Thrive that helps children in need around the world.
According to Manoj Kumar, the Managing Director, P&G West Africa, “We are pleased to partner with Society for Family Health to help improve people’s lives in communities affected by this health crisis - that’s our purpose as a company. While PUR is certainly not the only solution, it plays an important role in preventing the spread of the disease by providing safe drinking water to people in these communities.”
PUR, which was developed jointly by Procter & Gamble and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been shown to reduce diarrhea illness by an average 50 per cent in controlled health intervention studies.
PUR has been used to help respond to several emergency relief situations, including the Tsunami in Asia, hurricanes in the Caribbean, floods in the Philippines and Bangladesh, the Myanmar Cyclone disaster and recently the Haiti disaster
P&G’s corporate social responsibility platform: Live, Learn and Thrive (LLT). LLT focuses on the development of children between ages 0-13 by ensuring a healthy start for children (Live), providing access to places and tools to learn (Learn), and providing access to programs that build self-esteem, empowerment and interpersonal/social skills (Thrive).