The work of experienced scholars, public‐health advocates, and implementers, this new edition of Water and Sanitation‐Related Diseases and the Changing Environment offers a thorough review of some of the ranking problems of our time. Taken individually, these chapters constitute a critical compendium of ongoing debates among experts and a concise summary of more settled matters. But editor Janine Selendy has also woven these diverse chapters—which include highly focused considerations of specific waterborne illnesses and more broad‐ranging matters from climate change to technological innovation—into a powerful and hefty manual to guide collective action going forward.

Much of what appears in these pages is cause for concern, or should be. The structural violence of poverty, climate change, and socially constructed scarcity is evident in the long list of assaults and afflictions detailed in these pages: the preventable deaths from diarrhea of hundreds of thousands of children every year, the lack of access to safely managed water services for over two billion people globally, and the persistence of rudimentary sanitation systems—or none at all, in some areas—heighten risks of waterborne disease and even physical insecurity for over a third of the world’s population. But this volume, which will meet the expectations of specialists while instructing (and even entertaining) the lay reader, does more than offer jeremiads about failures. A case study of efforts to eradicate dracunculiasis—an “ancient loathesome disease” that as recently as 1986 infected 3.5 million people annually across a grim belt of Africa south of the Sahel—shows how an end to guinea‐worm disease is within our grasp.

Rescuing history and a bit of optimism, this pragmatic volume details numerous examples that serve to redefine what’s possible in the struggle for equitable access to clean water and effective sanitation, without which health and productive lives are impossible. Its chapters also take a pragmatic and aspirational view in seeking to identify key social, political, and economic changes essential to efforts to alleviate the harms caused by our collective failure to guarantee the most fundamental human rights. There’s little doubt that even the most unpromising settings—impoverished, bereft of clean water and sanitation, plagued by disease and disrupted by catastrophe—can be transformed with the requisite staff, stuff, space, and systems. Keeping these systems working requires ongoing accompaniment and investment, of course.

In the face of unprecedented climate and environmental change, low aspirations on behalf of others accelerate a deadly desertification of the imagination. In 2010, ten months after a devastating and deadly earthquake, ecologically fragile Haiti—one of the world’s most water‐insecure nations—was struck by a cholera outbreak that rapidly became the world’s largest, and remained so for most of the decade. Campaigns to halt it initially echoed control‐over‐care paradigms commonly imposed in settings of poverty. But cholera spread because Haiti is a public‐health desert; cholera killed where Haiti remains a clinical desert. We’ve seen this before. But paradigms of response—to cholera in Haiti and to other pressing health and human‐rights challenges—shift each time health professionals, activists, and policymakers come together to resist the notion that some people are simply too poor to treat, or otherwise just not worth the investment.

In addressing many of these challenges, the need for more data and less dogma is obvious. The first edition of Water and Sanitation‐Related Diseases and the Changing Environment promised playbooks to guide collective responses to a life‐and‐death struggle. In assembling and updating it, Selendy has accomplished all of this, and more. It will be an authoritative reference for practitioners and trainees to deliver on the promise of water, sanitation, and health for all.

We are all together in this world, breathing, as it were, as one, for each and every life affects those near to us and in the far reaches of the world.

As is evident throughout much of these two books, while health and living conditions are deplorable and life‐threatening for literally billions of children, women and men, it is with the emergence of successful initiatives, largely thanks to collaborations on local, national and international levels, that one can hope for a healthier future. As discussed in these two books, such cooperation has enabled Guinea worm disease to be nearly eradicated worldwide, Onchocerciasis to be eliminated in large regions, and trachoma to be officially validated as eliminated in five countries with a further six countries reporting that they have achieved the elimination targets.

Also, although already seriously complicated by extreme weather conditions and other effects of climate change, collaboration secured safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and hygiene for hundreds of millions of people.

I hope you will read both volumes of our books. You will find references to content in the 36 excellent chapters of the First Edition throughout this edition. Many of the chapters in the Second Edition have been revised and updated, such as with respect to the effects of climate change. Many of the chapters stand as they are in First Edition and are not included in this volume. They include substantial coverage of naturally occurring and anthropogenic pollutants, toxic cyanobacteria, and onchocerciasis, and chapters on sanitation initiatives in India, health in Ghana, cholera in Zimbabwe, small‐scale water services in developing countries, ocean pollution from flame retardants, and successful community interventions using kinship structures.

Several authors for both editions were joined by new or additional authors for the Second Edition which was written by authorities from the fields of climate change, epidemiology, environmental health, environmental engineering, demography, global health, medicine, medical anthropology, nutrition, and public health.

New chapters advance our discussions of nutrition and malnutrition, of ecosystems, and of population. They include “Food Systems and Nutrition, In The Context of Climate Change” by Director‐General José Graziano da Silva of the UN FAO, “Coping With Water Needs: The Demographic Future,” by Guigui Yao and Robert Wyman, and “Ecosystem Health as The Basis for Human Health” by Tom Barker and Jane Fisher. “The Human Right to Sanitation” by Anoop Jain and Jay P. Graham and “Catalyzing Rural Sanitation at Scale: Lessons Learned from The Global Sanitation Fund” by Carolien Van der Voorden and Patrick England add new ideas to discussion of the desperate sanitation situation with 2.4 billion people lacking adequate sanitation. “Antimicrobial Resistance” by Rochelle Rainey advances the discussion of the major problem facing people throughout the world as antibiotics can no longer be relied upon as they had been. And, drinking water is addressed throughout and exclusively in “Toward Universal Access to Basic and Safely Managed Drinking Water: Remaining Challenges and New Opportunities in the Era of Sustainable Development Goals,” by Mitsuaki Hirai and Jay Graham.

Complementary material related to both editions are available on the Wiley Companion website for the two volumes https://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/selendy/ with links to sources. This is a continually updated site for which suggested additions are welcome from our readers. Some of the content is also presented in articles on Horizon International's Solutions Site at www.solutions‐site.org and on the Global Innovation Exchange, for which Horizon International is a co‐creator, which is available at https://www.globalinnovationexchange.org/organizations/horizon‐international‐yale‐university.

As I wrote in the First Edition, the facts we present are often disconcertingly grave, but I believe the discussions in that edition and in the current edition which augment those facts and ideas will generate substantial action to address those concerns and by doing so they will generate hope.

I wish to express my immense gratitude to the 74 authors who not only gave of their time and expertise in writing for these volumes, but also provided me with counsel and inspiration as we together brought these two books to completion. Among them, Professor Robert Wyman, who is our immediate host at Yale. And, I wish to express my gratitude to Yale University for their hosting of Horizon International.

I am grateful to the editors of Wiley for their foresight and belief in our books, their attention to detail during the production stages, and their encouraging comments throughout the process, with a special note of appreciation to Ramprasad Jayakumar, Production Editor, who saw to the myriad details in the final stages of the book’s preparation.

All of us who have contributed to these books are thankful to Dr. Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard University and co‐founder of Partners in Health, and to Dr. Wafaie Fawzi, Chair, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) for expressing their appreciation of our work by giving of their time to write the Foreword and Afterword for the Second Edition. And a special thanks to Dr. Fawzi’s colleague Chelsey Canavan, Program Manager for the Nutrition and Global Health Program at HSPH, who co‐authored the Afterword.

I wish to recognize the commitment of untold numbers of people who give of their time, energy, and, for many, their lives to improve the lives of others. The direction of my own life was inspired by Dr. P. O. and Shanta Satralker, medical missionaries, with whom I had the privilege of living in Iran when I was 16 years old and who called themselves my Iranian Mom and Dad.

I dedicate this book to those whose love and encouragement are a constant source of support and inspiration: my sons, Philippe and Béla, my grandchildren, Max and Liam, and Nicolas and Linnea, my daughters‐in‐law, Jennifer and Ulrika, and Béla’s wife Helen; and, to Charles R. Dickey, my partner of 20 years, whose loving care and ready words of wisdom and humor are a constant gift, and our dog, Heather, whose good spirits and love are gifts to all who know her.