10.nov.06
New York Times
Celia W. Dugger
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/world/10toilet.html
A United Nations report released yesterday was cited as saying that the toilet and the latrine, which helped revolutionize public health in New York, London and Paris more than a century ago, are among the most underused tools to combat poverty and disease in the developing world.
Kevin Watkins, the main author of the report, was quoted as saying, "Issues dealing with human excrement tend not to figure prominently in the programs of political parties contesting elections or the agendas of governments. They’re the unwanted guests at the table."
Watkins was further cited as saying the human cost of that taboo, however, is more unspeakable than the topic itself, and that every year, more than two million children die of diarrhea and other sicknesses caused by dirty water and a lack of "access to sanitation."
That is the common euphemism for the reality that more than a third of the world’s people — 2.6 billion — have no decent place to go to the bathroom, while more than a billion get water for drinking, washing and cooking from sources polluted by human and animal feces.
At any time, almost half the people in developing countries have one or more of the main illnesses associated with inadequate water and sanitation and fill half the hospital beds, the report said. They are plagued by diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, trachoma and parasitic worms.
The United Nations Development Program’s annual attempt to measure human well-being focuses this year on the dearth of clean water and adequate sanitation for the world’s poor. The report, “Beyond Poverty: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis,” lays out the grim facts.
In Kibera, the sprawling slum in Nairobi, Kenya, people defecate in plastic bags that they dump in ditches or toss into the street — a practice known as “the flying toilet.” In Dharavi, the vast slum in Mumbai, India, there is only one toilet per 1,440 people — and during the monsoon rains, flooded lanes run with human excrement.
Across the countryside in Asia and Africa, people are forced to squat in streams, backyards and fields, befouling the water they drink, the places where their children play and the plots where their food grows.
The report’s authors estimate that it would cost $10 billion a year to halve the percentage of people without access to safe drinking water and to provide them with simple pit latrines. But that is less than half what rich countries spend annually on bottled water.
The report blames the governments of poor and rich countries for paying too little attention to this fundamental problem.