Don't love that dirty water

I turned in the last of my grades yesterday and have spent part of today sorting out my home office. It didn't take long to find a stack of clippings torn from newspapers and magazines -- mostly articles I intended to blog about over the past year or so. Oops.

From June 2008, for example, I had pulled a Maude Barlow piece in The American Prospect on water-borne disease:

Every day more and more people are living without access to clean water. As the ecological crisis deepens, so too does the human crisis. More children are killed by dirty water than by war, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and traffic accidents combined.

...the World Health Organization reports that environmental factors, including contaminated water, are implicated in 80 percent of all sickness and disease worldwide. In the last decade, the number of children killed by diarrhea exceeded the number of people killed in all armed conflicts since World War II. Every eight seconds, a child dies from drinking dirty water.

Barlow is head of the Council of Canadians and her article was part of a special insert on the global fresh water crisis.

A sidebar piece a few pages after Barlow's article (adapted from her book Blue Covenant) noted that "The annual death toll from water-related diseases is estimated at more than 5 million."


Title apologies to the Standells, who played a terrific guitar riff in their song "Dirty Water."

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