A 200,000+ Death Toll Every Week!

Ron Sider writes

"The wrenching news about the ghastly devastation caused by the Asian tsunami rolled in day after day as I was finishing the revisions for the fifth edition of my Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. 20,000 dead . . . then 50,000, 100,000, 175,000. The final count could easily reach 200,000 lives suddenly snuffed out by the raging ocean.

People of the world rightly recoiled in horror and then swiftly launched a massive global effort to save those whom the sea had spared.

200,000 deaths in one terrifying tsunami is truly awful. But far more than that number of people die unnecessarily every week-this week, next week and every week for years.

Why? Because of poverty the rich world chooses largely to ignore. Every day 30,000 children die of starvation and diseases we know how to prevent. That is 210,000 children every week, not counting adults. That means that fifty-two times as many children die unnecessarily from poverty every year as everyone who perished in the year-end tsunami.

According to the World Bank, 1.2 billion people struggle to survive on just one dollar a day. Another 1.6 billion live on less than two dollars a day.

That kind of poverty brings inadequate food, lack of clean water and sanitation, inadequate or no medical care, and therefore unnecessary disease, brain damage, and illiteracy. In 2004, the World Bank reported that one billion people lack access to safe water, and 2.5 billion have no access to improved sanitation. (The World Health Organization estimates that 6000 children die every day from these two causes alone.) About 950 million poor people cannot read. The World Health Organization reports that 13 million people die each year from diseases like diarrhea, malaria and tuberculosis that we know how to prevent or cure."

According to the World Health Organization, it would only take about $3 billion more invested each year in preventive care in poorer nations to save 5 million people. Can Americans who spend $30-$50 billion each year on diets to reduce their calorie intake not give one-tenth of that to save 5 million people a year?"
Read More