In this TED talk, British journalist and author Rose George discusses – with enjoyable and necessary humour – diarrhoea and global sanitation. She offers some sobering statistics: 2.5 billion people – 40% of the world’s population – have no adequate toilet, and routinely defecate in the open. With the example of a boy doing just this in India, she explains why this is a problem: the boy will not wash, will return home barefoot, and contaminate his domestic water supply via his soiled hands and feet. Such stories explain why diarrhoea is the second-biggest killer of children worldwide, claiming 4,000 children every single day – more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and measles combined. Poor sanitation costs the world about $260 billion each year.
What’s shameful, explains Ms George, is that we know what can solve the problem: the flush toilet, which was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by readers of the British Medical Journal (ahead of the Pill, anaesthesia and surgery). Yet investment in sanitation and adequate toilets is seriously inadequate: it’s the most off-track Millennium Development Goal, by about 50 years. Ms George’s advice is, essentially, to be less embarrassed; she notes the change in Japan, where 70 years ago people used pit latrines and wiped with sticks, yet now publicly discuss upgrading their toilets with heated seats and bidet nozzles. She also mentions the success of attitude-changing campaigns such as India’s “No Loo, No ‘I Do’” movement, which encourages girls to refuse to marry into households that have no toilets.
Our attitude towards the treatment of human waste affects the world in more ways than just disease: twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school due to inadequate sanitation and the resulting pressures of holding it in every day, especially combined with menstruation upon reaching puberty. Jails in Rwanda are now using gas from human waste to cook meals. And injections of the stuff – bear with us – are 94% successful in curing the antibiotic-resistant superbug C. diff.
You can watch the TED Talk in full below, and remember, when discussing with your friends how to eliminate disease in the developing world, don’t hesitate to talk shit.
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