By the looks of it, a new cause has been born: bringing access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene to those on the planet who still lack it.

In the past few weeks Cirque du Soleil’s founder flew to outer space; superstars, led by Jessica Biel, pledged...

It's mind boggling. We have a cure to solve life-threatening global public health problems, yet we fail to apply it consistently. The cure, dubbed the most important medical advance of the 20th century by readers of the British Medial Journal, is basic sanitation, good hygiene and access to safe...

Since the G8 met last year in Hokkaido, over 1.4 million children have died from diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water and toilets. Today the leaders failed again to take steps to address this solvable global public health crisis and...

Co-authored with Katryn Bowe

More than 90,000 Americans have signed an unprecedented petition to the Senate in support of global access to clean water and sanitation. The petition calls for more Senators to join Sen. Durbin and Sen. Corker to sponsor the Senator Paul Simon Water for the...

Two new reports out this week by WaterAid and PATH remind us what we have shamefully forgotten: diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide. This is a wake-up call because even those of us in the international development field have pretty much neglected the fact that diarrhea is...

There is a photograph that travelers inevitably take when they go to a developing country -- a picture of a woman carrying a large container of water on her head. The woman's posture is ramrod straight, the envy of runway models everywhere, and her face rarely betrays the amount of...

A few days ago at a DC-style networking session for public health folks, I introduced myself as the Communications Director for Water Advocates.

I am used to receiving surprised -- even shocked -- expressions when people learn that poor sanitation and unsafe water cause the illnesses that fill half...

Public indifference to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was chronicled in 1987 in And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. As the author Randy Shilts lamented, "Everyone responded with an ordinary pace to an extraordinary situation." Thankfully now there is attention to this deadly disease, but it wasn't...

Last week a mix of water and sanitation experts gathered for World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden to mull over the world's biggest public health crisis. The problem is that not enough people paid attention.

Each year over 2 million deaths could be prevented with improvements related to...

Each day in developing countries more children die unnecessarily from water-related diseases than there are people in my hometown on Long Island, NY. Around 4,000 children per day or 1.5 million per year die from an age-old form of water torture known as diarrhea.

Sometimes I imagine this: the entire...

Diseases associated with water and sanitation continue to cause thousands of preventable deaths each day. About 135,000 children die each month, a disaster by anyone's standards. It is an interesting phenomenon that society pays attention to a natural disaster -- like an earthquake or a tsunami -- far differently than...

With last week's news about more sanctions on Iran, the fires in California, and the start of the World Series, it's no surprise that there was scant coverage of Howard G. Buffet's $150 million commitment to alleviate the water crisis in East and West Africa and Central America. (Howard is...

Last week, Stockholm hosted the most important yearly meeting to discuss the world's largest public health crisis. No, this was not the planning meeting for World AIDS Day, nor was it a global malaria conference. It was World Water Week -- the biggest meeting outside the World Water Forum,...