The Science
The science is simple: drinking poop kills.
Nobody wants to drink poop… but when water comes from a shallow well and the only place to do your business is a pit latrine, it happens.
Amoebas, cholera, shigella, campylobacter, salmonella… these parasites and bacteria have a problem: they kill their hosts. However, their survival strategy is brilliant. And gross. They multiply inside stomachs and intestines, and then cause their hosts to blast them out their colons in the messiest way possible.
This way, these microscopic killers come into contact with skin, fingers, and even dishes or unprotected drinking water, ensuring a free ride to the next host. For a human child, becoming a host may mean death.
Diarrhea vs. The Third Reich
Adolf Hitler’s rule lasted 12 years (1933-1945). His Third Reich killed between 11 and 15 million people: Jews, Soviets, Poles, Slavs, mentally handicapped people, homosexuals…
That’s at most about 1.25 million people per year.
Diarrhea kills 1.8 million children per year.1
Diarrhea wins.
In fact diarrhea kills five times more children than HIV/AIDS. Diarrhea kills more people than tuberculosis or malaria. Car crashes, cancer, war… diarrhea beats them all.2
But we’re smarter than amoebas, and we can win in the end.
How? It’s simple: drill a hole deep underground where the amoebas can’t go.
Diarrhea beats Hitler.
Deep water wells beat diarrhea.
Love wins… if we do something.
Footnotes:
- This statistic was was calculated by the good folks over at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for their 2006 Human Development Report, Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty, and the global water crisis, and can be found on page 6.
- Same folks, same report… page 42.
