Not a drop to drink
I read a lot of shocking information every day but I can't remember when a statistic surprised me as much as this one:
More people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war.
That statement is shocking, but the actual numbers are truly overwhelming. More than 3.5 million people die each year from preventable water-related diseases such as diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery.
And this is the worst: That total includes about 4,000 children under the age of five who die every day.
Every day.
That means that every two months, the loss of young children alone equals the total death toll from the earthquake in Haiti.
I don't know about you, but I had no idea that a crisis this enormous existed.
This morning I happened across an article about World Water Day, which came and went on March 22 without much fanfare. (Yet, I'm sure if Tiger were thirsty one morning, we would have heard about it in painstaking detail.)
Every year for 17 years the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development has sponsored this awareness day to draw attention to what amounts to a permanent international emergency.
The article had no information about how to help, but after searching a bit I found an aid organization called "charity: water."
According to the website, charitywater.org, 100 percent of donations directly fund freshwater projects in developing nations. This is made possible by private donors who take care of all administrative costs. And if you like, you can direct a donation specifically to Haitian relief efforts. Needless to say, the fresh water situation there is dire.
So...a no-brainer? I guess that would be each individual's call. But the website calculates that just $20 provides one person with safe drinking water for 20 years.
That's a rock solid return on investment.
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Jenny Thompson is the Director of the Health Sciences Institute and editor of the HSI e-Alert. Through HSI, she and her team uncover important health information and expose ridiculous health misinformation, most notably through the HSI e-Alert.
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Comments
Anonymous
I am sorry to hear about other nations, as their governments do not give a hoot about their population, we are more concerned about other countries that we ignore our own, first off we need to clean our water supply, have you any idea the contaminants in our water supply, the contaminants in our fruits and vegetables, it is getting to point that we can not eat the skin any more, let us worry first about cleaning the good old USA and when we learn from this experience, we can help the rest of the world, as someone puts it, is best to drink from a mud hole somewhere in the world than drinking our water supply, this propaganda about charity is bogus, about 95% is just to help a few greedy people and Americans are being suckered, charity is big business now days, all monies collected, still the poor will remain poor, start by helping in your neighborhood, there are people in need more than you are aware of, forget about third world countries, start in your own backyard and that taken care of, move to other parts, unless there is an emergency of course but this should be the responsibility of all industrial nations
David C
Several charities are worthy of our attention, and I salute you for bringing charitywater.org to our attention. Catholic Charities and the Mormons also give freely without scandalous overhead. There is also a charity for providing mosquito netting to prevent the spread of malaria. I will never be so poor as to not be generous to worthy causes.
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