Cholera. Plague. Typhoid. Beyond reading headlines in their morning papers, people in Western nations have little contact with these diseases, but in the developing world, where crowded cities often lack sewer systems, they are part of daily life. And the situation is getting worse. According to a report released this past summer by the United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef), almost 3 billion people—about half the world’s population—now live without clean toilets. More than 2 million children die each year from diarrhea-causing diseases, infected by bacteria that could easily have been avoided if they had been flushed down a pipe.
There’s a grim irony to this crisis. At the same time that sanitation has been neglected, clean drinking water—a more politically powerful issue—has not. Over the past seven years, 800 million people have gained access to safe drinking water. During the same time, the number of people without access to clean ...
