CNN) -- It still makes Fatoma Dia's eyes widen whenever the Hilton hotel cleaning worker sees a bar of barely used soap on a bathroom counter.
"This," she says, picking it up with a gloved hand and dropping it in a brown bucket, "is valuable where I come from."
The 35-year-old grew up in a mountainous region of southern Sudan where soap can cost more than a day's wages. Because some in the region, could not wash, they got sick.
Across the globe, 2.4 billion people do not have access to clean sanitation, according to the World Health Organization. An estimated 1.5 million children die every year because their immune systems are not mature enough to battle diarrheal and respiratory diseases spread in contaminated environments.
Sicknesses related to contaminated water supplies and poor human hygiene tend to plague poorer regions in sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, East Asia and the Caribbean. Water-borne illnesses such as cholera can hit countries suddenly, particularly in the wake of a natural disaster where there is little infrastructure previously in place to handle sustainable cleanup and recovery.
A recent example is Haiti. Hit by an earthquake in January 2010, many Haitians were forced to live in tent camps and use water that was contaminated. Incidents of cholera plagued the country, a problem that continues today.
Dr. Eric Mintz, leader of the Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Epidemiology team at the CDC
Politically vulnerable nations or countries in the grip of war are also breeding grounds for sickness caused by poor sanitation. Illness tends to spread quicker when people are forced into cramped and overcrowded refugee camps where there are few bathrooms or none at all.
Dia, who says she was the victim of religious persecution in Sudan, came to the U.S. several years ago. Her immigration liaison connected her with a job cleaning hotel rooms. In her home country, she personally had access to soap. But coming from a place with little sanitation to a hotel that observed a spick-and-span ethos was strange.
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