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It’s a curious fact of media life that international organizations are deemed to plod along, rarely doing anything newsworthy. As a result, hardly any reporters, at least in the English-language media, cover international organizations. New happens in small waves, not tsunamis of world-changing impact, and small waves are easy to ignore.

Photo: Lake Geneva, the source of most of the drinking water in the region, contains microscopic quantities of medications, herbicides and pesticides, according to the Swiss federal government.

Two waves in the past few days may be bigger than we ho-hum journalists think: the New York Times (annoyingly, you have to register to read this), but no one in Switzerland or even Europe at first glance, pointed out that the ICRC in Geneva has protested to the Pentagon over the expansion of the prison at an army base in Afghanistan.

Where’s the local, as in Swiss, press on this story? The base now holds 630 prisoners, about three times as many as at Guantanamo Bay, under similar conditions. The Pentagon, it appears, is in a quandary, but while the Pentagon has journalists swarming over it, daily, the ICRC, which knows at least as much about what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan, is mostly ignored. Our (the public’s) loss.

The other story is even more obscure and ho-hum, and hardly smacks of earth-shaking events, but looking back 10 years from now someone will realize that this mattered: the ISO has just published a set of international standards for drinking and waste water that are a direct response to concerns voiced by the  United Nations which has said that "access to water is an essential human right."

Sounds boring, right?

There is a journalistic-source difference here: the ICRC doesn’t talk about a lot of its work, so journalists have to go looking for it, which Swiss journalists rarely do and there are too few international ones in Geneva to take the job on board. The ISO, on the other hand, has trouble getting journalists interested in a stream of changes in world standards, all with similar-sounding numbers, despite a good media relations programme.

So tell me this, which is more likely to make something truly lasting happen?

• George W Bush visiting Israel Wednesday, where Big Words will be said by all parties concerned, the BBC and CNN will run headlines, but a year from now we’ll try to remember what that was all about
• or ISO standards that set out what it means and how you go about ensuring safe drinking water for everyone in the world. This means rich or poor, so that: engineers in Lausanne know what exactly they are expected to do to get rid of my medicines and yours that are floating around in Lake Geneva (the source of our drinking water); the state of Montana at the northern end of the US knows what its own water regulations should be as part of the process of determining its water rights in relation to those of states further south;  critically, Afghanistan can establish clear priorities for water access in order to achieve peace.

l vote for water standards, over Middle East high-profile visits, to make a difference.

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