Problems of Poverty

This morning I found this poverty website that shows the number of people that die every minute due to a problem caused by poverty. The problems that the website discusses are hunger, diarrhea, AIDS, Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, Malaria, and Measles. For hunger alone, the death count per day is 25,000. They discuss programs that help people get food for working or get food while they're at school. Providing food for children that go to school gives them more motivation to get their education which will eventually lead to good jobs and staying out of an impoverished life. Other problems linked to poverty have lower death tolls than hunger, but the lives claimed are still outrageous. Diarrhea, due to unclean water and unsafe sanitation kills around 1.6 million people, while AIDS kills about 240 people every hour, which equals about 5760 people a day. Diarrhea is a simple problem to solve and Oral Rehydration Therapy has greatly reduced the deaths caused by diarrhea in the past few years. Obviously there is no known cure for AIDS, but it can be prevented. However, it is a preventable disease. The number one preventative measure is education! The website also shows how much aid countries gave in 2008. Sweden has gave the most with $0.98 for every $100 the country earned. The United States came in last place with $0.18 for every $100 our country earned. This may make us look like a selfish country because we are one of the richest countries. I understand our lack of giving because there is so much poverty here in America that we still have to take care of. However, the United States did sign an agreement in 2002 saying that we would eventually be giving $0.70 for every $100 our country earns. Since we signed this agreement, we definitely need to follow through. To find out how you can help, or to just explore the website, visit www.poverty.com