2012•02•16     USA Today

Excerpt from the USA Today article by Wendy Koch:

Canadian-based researchers say they’ve been able to quantify — for the first time — how safe water and public sanitation efforts affect health when factoring out other variables such as a nation’s wealth, fertility or location.

“The fact we can see a linear relationship…was a surprising finding,” says co-author June J. Cheng of Ontario-based McMaster University, which co-teamed with the United Nations University, the U.N.’s academic arm. The study, published in the British journal Environmental Health, analyzed data from 2008 to 2010, the most recent available.