A lot of metropolitan cities in the United States—like our own home of Salt Lake City, Utah—have populations well under one million. Try to imagine for a moment what it would be like if everyone in the city you lived in died over the course of a single year. Or even in just six months. If this went on in the United States or Europe our leaders would declare it a national disaster, but in poorer countries it goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Furthermore, the rising level of disease from sanitation issues is not only effecting the developing countries. This has become a global issue for Eastern and Western hemispheres, both north and south: in this age of cheap airline travel, every one of us is now just one international flight away from these diseases.

1.1 billion people still practice open defecation: the act of eliminating outdoors in fields, rivers, railways, streets, and sidewalks. Even when there is access to safe latrines, convenience and cultural norms will often lead them to continue defecating in the open and spreading disease.

In India alone—the open defecation capitol of the world—there are more than 600 million open defecators. That number is nearly two times the entire population of the United States.

Although humans have done this for hundreds of thousands of years, as the world's population increases and people are residing in increasingly crowded numbers all that crap is really starting to pile up.

In places where people have improved sanitation, disease from exposure to human feces is a fraction of what the developing world faces every single day.

These same women also face limited or no supplies to comfortably and safely manage their monthlies and will use sand, husks, dirty old cloths, or even ash to try and contain it – a practice which often leads to infections that can cripple or kill. There are safe solutions and education that can be tailored to the cultures that have this problem, and Sum1 brings this information as well to improve the lives of these women.

When you take the time to explain the biology of menstruation—that there is nothing evil or wrong with it—you empower women who sometimes have lived with shame their entire lives. When you show them how easy it is to create a reusable, washable pad you give them hope.

In some places people will only quickly rinse their hands with water, which is sometimes just as contaminated. Other times all they do is scrub their hands with dirt or sand. Or wipe dirty hands on equally contaminated grass.

In many parts of the world, it's not thought to be important to wash before cooking or preparing meals, thinking that their hands are getting clean enough while handling the food; in truth, they are contaminating that food with fecal matter and dangerous pathogens before feeding it to families. In some cultures, it's only viewed as important to wash hands after eating a meal, not before.

Even educated healthcare workers and medical professionals can forget and become lax in washing hands, which is a major part of why hospital post-operative staph infections are running rampant in many parts of the world. Even here in the United States.

Working together, we know can change the world. But we really need your help to do it. Every dollar adds up, just as every person who steps up to give their support also adds up.