Water supply and sanitation are amongst the most basic requirements of life. For the past 50 to 150 years people living in Europe, America and a few capital cities elsewhere around the globe have come to take for granted the provision of a virtually limitless supply of clean, safe water and the seemingly effortless removal of all human wastes ‘out of sight and out of mind’. That this miracle of collective political will, urban planning and engineering bravura is so much taken for granted is credit to the public health engineers, planners, civic administrators and politicians who made it possible. That we should take it.
