ABSTRACT
The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in just one day, but at least that number of children die every day across the South from avoidable intestinal diseases including diarrhoea and dysentery, brought on mainly by impure water supplies. In Iraq in the closing months of 2006, the monthly death-toll of civilians in the insurgency and in sectarian violence was very nearly the same as the losses in the 9/11 attacks. In Rwanda in the mid-1990s, close to a million people died in genocidal attacks, and continuing conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa have since killed even more people. In the mid-1970s, it was estimated that over 400 million people suffered from malnutrition, but today this has risen to at least 700 million. Across the world, more than two billion people survive on the equivalent of two US dollars a day or less. The diseases of poverty are mostly avoidable yet kill millions of people each year.
