Silent But Deadly

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

There is a deadly killer among us. One that takes a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined. The king of all killers on Earth? Poop, of course.

• According to the World Health Organization, diarrhea caused by poor sanitary conditions is the #1 killer in the world
• 80 percent of all world illness is due to unclean water
• Every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water-related diseases, mostly young children (3,900 every day according to the United Nations)
• 40 percent of the world, particularly Africa and Asia, does not have access to clean drinking water
• About 10,000 people die from bad or no water every day—about seven per minute.

Much of this water-based illness can be attributed to water sources contaminated by raw sewage. How can this happen? How can the most evolved species on the planet be dying off from eating poop?

Part of the reason is poverty. About 40 percent of the world’s population has no bathroom facilities. That means 2.6 billion people think of a toilet as a luxury item, if they even know what one is. Without toilets, they’re forced to use bare ground or a public latrine.

In developing civilizations, people have learned not to soil the water upstream of their drinking source. But everything is downstream of something, so this solution is by no means fool-proof.

Contaminating our freshwater with sewage becomes even more of an issue when you consider our supply. The Earth’s water supply never changes because there’s really nowhere for it to go, but it isn’t available for consumption by any means.

Let’s visualize the Earth’s water supply as a five gallon water cooler:

• All but about one pint would be salt water—undrinkable
• The amount available for consumption that wasn’t polluted or locked under ground would be less than one fourth of a teaspoon
• This number shrinks every day as water is polluted

If we consider water cleanup as a health investment, the numbers make sense. Analysts estimate that for every dollar spent, there would be an economic return of between $3 and $34, depending upon the country. That’s an awfully good ROI; even at a meager 3 to 1.

Another interesting death economy statistic is that most people who die from diarrhea ultimately succumb to dehydration, and most of the diseases are self-limiting and short-term. We could save millions of lives every year with about $1 worth of electrolyte replacement drink for each life saved.

Compare that to only one telethon: Jerry Lewis raised $64 million last year for MDA (about 1/3 of MDA’s $186 million last year), and has raised $1.46 billion in his 41 years of telethons. The number of cures to date? Zero. Don’t tell that to one of the 3,900 children that will die today from drinking contaminated water.