At a critical UN Summit to review efforts to tackle world poverty, international charity WaterAid let loose a giant poo on the streets of New York to highlight a global sanitation crisis responsible for 4000 child deaths every day.
Diarrhoeal diseases caused by poor sanitation and unsafe water kill more children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined, while in Africa diarrhoea is now the biggest killer of children under five. Some 2.6 billion people across the globe live with no access to a safe clean toilet.
WaterAid’s Kate Norgrove said: “A giant poo at large on the streets of New York may seem like an odd way to get a serious message across but sanitation is still such a taboo subject that getting world leaders to address the issue calls for drastic measures.”
To coincide with the summit, WaterAid has also published a damning new report – Ignored: Biggest Child Killer – The world is neglecting sanitation - containing hard-hitting testimonies from global health experts and people across the developing world whose health and education are in jeopardy because of poor sanitation.
At current rates of progress, the 2015 sanitation Millennium Development Goal target to halve the proportion of people living without sanitation will not be met globally until 2049; in Sub-Saharan Africa not until the 23rd century, some 200 years late.
Norgrove continued: “If sanitation continues to be ignored, this will have huge consequences for the health of the world’s poorest people. Governments have a moral duty to deliver on the Millennium promises they made to ‘free the entire human race from want’. This simply won’t happen if one of the main underlying causes of child mortality is overlooked.”
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