Curated playlist
Sanitation
- DiarrheaDiarrhea kills more than a million and a half people every year. In 2019, the death toll reached 1.53 million. And yet this condition, which the World Health Organization defines simply as three or more loose or liquid stools per day, is…
- Water pollutionWater pollution touches nearly every body of water on Earth. Lakes, rivers, oceans, aquifers, reservoirs, and groundwater are all vulnerable to contamination, and the consequences range from dead fish to dead children. A 2017 study put a…
- CholeraCholera, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, has the power to kill an untreated person within hours. A healthy adult can lose ten to twenty litres of fluid in a single day. The skin turns bluish-grey from extreme fluid loss, which is…
- ToiletA toilet is a piece of sanitary hardware that collects human waste, and 419 million people have no access to one at all. They must openly defecate and urinate instead. That single number sits at the center of a much larger story, one that…
- Sewage treatmentSewage treatment is the work of taking the wastewater that drains from households and businesses and turning it into an effluent clean enough to send back into a river, a bay, or a field. At the global level, an estimated 52% of sewage is…
- Drinking waterDrinking water is water that is safe for ingestion, whether someone drinks it straight or takes it in through prepared food. As many as two billion people lack it. Water carries vectors of disease, and it is a major cause of death and…
- Stunted growthStunted growth is a condition where impaired development leaves a child shorter than expected for their age, and it is one of the most consequential forms of malnutrition on Earth. More than 85% of the world's stunted children live in Asia…
- HygieneHygiene is a word that hides an enormous claim inside a small idea. The World Health Organization defines it as conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases. For some viruses, the infectious dose…
- GastroenteritisGastroenteritis is an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, reaching from the stomach into the intestine. In Canada and the United States, people often call it "stomach flu," though it has nothing to do with influenza. The symptoms…
- SanitationSanitation begins with a single, unglamorous goal: keeping human waste away from human mouths. The route it tries to block even has a name in the field, the fecal-oral route, and the diseases it carries read like a roll call of human…