The public health risks of drinking water polluted by human waste are well documented. In 2010, some 10,000 people in Haiti died and hundreds of thousands more were sickened by cholera, in an epidemic resulting from the mishandling of septic tanks at a UN Peacekeeper camp and dumping into a river. As late as the 1920s, before the advent of modern

More than 2 million Americans don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home.

The latrines were so abhorrent that most people, Nepalese and Westerners alike, evacuated their bowels outside on the open ground, wherever the urge struck. Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it. The river of snowmelt meandering through the center of the settlement was an open sewer.