Each year about two million people die as a result of poor sanitation and contaminated water, and 90 percent of the victims are children."
Is the Watchtower going to try to do something about this disaster? Of course not, Watchtower Bible & Tract Society just uses the bad news to further their cause and book publishing company. Those "worldly" Christian churches at least actually do charitable works for poor children from 3rd world countries.
In all seriousness, this quote is likely true but it is aimed at 3rd world countries, not the United States.
http://www.globalhealth.org/child_health/child_mortality/causes_death/
But, what these statistics are not telling you is that poverty is going down. China's population is rising out of poverty. That's huge!
http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-around-the-world
While this at least sounds encouraging, it masks regional variations, and perhaps most glaringly the impact of China:
- China’s poverty rate fell from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people
- China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty
- Excluding China, poverty fell only by around 10%
As a result, the World Bank feels that while China is on target to reach the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty and tackle various other issues, most other countries are not.
Here are the World Bank’s new estimates of poverty at different poverty levels:
Different poverty levels
Poverty lines shown here include $1 a day, $1.25 a day, $1.45 a day, $2 a day (typical for many developing countries), $2.50 a day (which includes a poverty level for some additional countries), and $10 a day, which a World Bank report referred to if looking at poverty from the level of a wealthy country, such as the US.