C3
Poverty
The third of four kinds of harm, and the first where nothing is counted directly. Nobody records a death as "from unsafe water"; it is estimated from how many people lack safe water and how much more likely that makes them to die, using published medical research.
This exists to follow one instruction — count the people who died of bad water and bad food, and leave out natural deaths — without anybody having to decide what "natural" means. A death is counted only when research has measured what share of that kind of death is caused by something the economy produces, spreads or withholds. Anything without such a measure is left out by arithmetic, not by opinion — and most of what belongs here is left out today, because the research has not been read yet.
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The products this kind of harm reaches
Each product whose figure includes Poverty, with its deaths per item and the part of that figure this kind of harm accounts for.
Scenario Economic-embedded, using FIGARO 2023.
In this calculation, no product’s figure reaches it.
What this kind of harm counts
What is here now is deaths from diarrhoea caused by unsafe drinking water, unsafe sanitation and the lack of handwashing. The figures are the World Health Organization’s own estimates, published with a low and high value for every country.
Beside them is a second set of figures this project works out on its own, from how many people have safe water, sanitation and handwashing, and from risks taken from a cited medical paper. It is never added to the first. It exists so the two can be compared, and for the typical country the two agree to within two per cent — the best evidence available that the method works where it can be checked.
Counted ONLY where research has measured what share of a kind of death a cause explains — for example, the share of diarrhoea deaths caused by unsafe water. A death with no such measured cause is left out automatically.
What the records hold today
183
Events in the records
856,559
Deaths recorded by the source
183
Countries
0
Wars
2019–2019
Years covered
These figures are the publisher’s own, shown with the credit its licence asks for. Nothing on this page has been linked to a product, a company or a material.
| Confidence of the death records | Records |
|---|---|
| MEDIUM | 183 |
The causes it includes
| Cause | Estimated from its cause | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Diarrhoeal disease C3-DIARRHOEA |
yes | 183 |
| Acute lower respiratory infection C3-ARI |
yes | not counted here |
| Disease attributable to household air pollution C3-HAP |
yes | not counted here |
| Undernutrition C3-UNDERNUTRITION |
yes | not counted here |
Which sectors carry this harm
Which industries this kind of harm is linked to, weighted by how much harm lies behind each share rather than averaged over countries.
100.0% of the deaths recorded for this kind of harm belong to a subject that has been attributed at all — that is, to a war or a report that has been linked to industries — 159 of 183.
| sector | share | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Water collection, treatment and supply 36 |
60.8% | LOW |
| Sewerage 37 |
39.2% | LOW |
| Other and unattributed economic activity OTHER |
0.0% | INDICATIVE |
These are shares, not counts of people. The number of deaths each industry stands for is calculated but not published: it has no range yet and has not passed the test on past years.
Linking deaths from poverty to the economy is the model’s most contestable step. It says the harm comes from something that was NOT MADE — the water pipe that was never laid — which is a different kind of claim from linking a death in battle to oil. The conservative scenario links none of it, so a reader who rejects the idea still has a number.
What it does not capture
- Hunger is not here. It is the largest thing that belongs here, and nobody has yet read and cited the research measuring its risk, so the software refuses it. That is unfinished work, stated rather than filled in with an assumption.
- Smoke from cooking fires indoors is not here either, for a more awkward reason: estimates of its deaths are published, but not the share of each kind of death it causes — and a death whose share of its cause cannot be stated is not counted here. The data has been downloaded and recorded, and deliberately left out.
- The shares of deaths explained by each cause cannot simply be added. A child with unsafe water and no toilet is not two deaths explained; the causes overlap, and adding them would overstate the total by more than a tenth with just these two.
- The figures cover a single year, because that is all the publisher published. With one year there is no trend, and nothing here should be read as one.
- A death here may also be counted under another kind of harm: cholera in a city under siege is both a poverty death and a war death. No total for one kind of harm is added to another until the overlap is measured.
Sources and credit
| Version of the data | Downloaded | File fingerprint (SHA-256) |
|---|---|---|
| wmo_ncd · wsh_10-20261006 | 2026-10-06 | 749a612a089025fe… |
World Health Organization, Global Health Estimates. WHO did not prepare, review or endorse these derived figures — wsh_10-20261006, retrieved 2026-10-06 from https://ghoapi.azureedge.net/api/WSH_10. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/igo/). Data modified by HumanToll.
Questions
What does “caused by unsafe water” mean here?
That a share of the deaths from a disease would not have happened if people had had safe water. It is a share of deaths across a whole population, never a claim about any one person, and it is worked out from how many people lack safe water and how much more likely they are to die.
Why is there so little here?
Because each cause needs published research measuring its risk, read and cited with its uncertainty, and reading it takes time. The one source that covers all causes at once may only be used for non-commercial purposes, and no permission for this project’s use is on record. What is missing is listed rather than estimated.
Whose numbers are the main ones?
The World Health Organization’s. Where the organisation responsible for the data has done the estimate itself, that is better evidence than ours, and our own calculation is kept beside it as a check rather than used as the answer.
Is this a lower bound too?
More than anything else here. Two of its three largest causes are missing entirely, it covers one year, and harm that cannot be linked to a cause is not counted at all.