Billions Haven’t a Pot to You-Know-What In

For World Toilet Day (Nov. 19), (Damn, we MISSED it:)..)we offer a chat with the author of the new book The Big Necessity.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/billions-haven%E2%80%99t-a-pot-to-you-know-what-in-832


To hear the rationale for the space shuttle's $23.4 million toilet or learn from Herodotus that "in Egypt, women stand erect to make water; the men stoop," you need consult but one source, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. Released this fall, it is journalist Rose George's account of three years exploring the world of toilets. Though it covers much more, the author says the book was inspired by the plight of those without sanitation: Some 2.6 billion people, she says, "don't even have a bucket." Miller-McCune.com talked to George during a recent visit to Washington, D.C., for a book signing sponsored by Path and Water Advocates. In that talk, she offered a chilling statistic: "A child is killed every 15 seconds" by water-related diseases due to the lack of sanitation.

And George said it's not solely a matter of poverty. "It's possible to have a malnourished child in a well-fed family — where they've got no latrine. You've got open defecation; it's getting tracked back into the village; it's getting into food; it's getting into water. The kid is ingesting toxic material with every mouthful."

Rules of the Road....George, who makes her home in the United Kingdom, spent more than three years traveling the world, exploring toilets, sewers, latrines and the people who use them.

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It depends, she said, on how you approach the topic. When it comes to "poop," she added, "Everyone has a story to tell."
While on the road in rural China, she and her translator pulled into a service station, both badly needing to use the bathroom. Taking their places at the end of a long queue, they were approached by some of the local women who were also waiting in line. As a courtesy to their foreign visitor, the women implored George to move to the head of the queue and take her turn before theirs. George said it was all she could do to resist their entreaties, noting that the "bathroom" had no door and offered no privacy. She preferred to be last. "It was wide open and they could see everything," George said.

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In India, at the extreme end of the human-waste-aversion scale, where fecal material is the very definition of taboo, the thankless and poorly paying task of hand cleaning latrines has traditionally fallen upon the caste known as Dalits, or untouchables. Though the practice has been outlawed for decades, owing to crushing poverty, there is no shortage of takers for this terrible job.

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"Think about your water consumption — whether you really need to flush your toilet 10 times a day — maybe you can flush it seven times a day so you're taking pressure off the sewer system," she said. "People can very practically write to their representative and say, 'What are you doing in this International Year of Sanitation when 2.6 million people don't even have a bucket?'" Whether you call it poop, human waste or prefer a more colorful term, George said don't be afraid to talk about it.

"It's the building block for all sorts of other development," George said. "Sanitation really needs attention — and affection."

and 10% everything else. Buggy water problems are compounded in areas where there is little local fuel to boil it and people are too poor to buy enough kerosene to do the job. Digging latrines and showing folks how to maintain them would cure much of the childhood mortality in the area as the water supply gradually improved. Open latrines take years to turn into fertilizer and only when the area is moved every few months, leaving the former latrine area as a biohazard for anyone who goes near it.

As for the toilet flushing problem, I've lived on Cape Cod and now in the desert. In both places, "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."