Cause of fatal diseases

One billion people worldwide still practise “open defecation” and they need to be told that this leads to the spread of fatal diseases, U.N. experts said on Thursday at the launch of a study on drinking water and sanitation.  ” ‘Excreta’, ‘faeces’, ‘poo’, I could even say ‘shit’ maybe, this is the root cause of so many diseases,” said Bruce Gordon, acting coordinator for sanitation and health at the World Health Organization.

Societies that practice open defecation – putting them at risk from cholera, diarrhoea, dysentry, hepatitis A and typhoid – tend to have large income disparities and the world’s highest numbers of deaths of children under 5 years old. Attempts to improve sanitation among the poorest have long focused on building latrines, but the United Nations says that money literally went down the toilet. Attitudes, not infrastructure, need to change, it said.

“In all honesty the results have been abysmal,” said Rolf Luyendijk, a statistician at the U.N.’s children’s fund UNICEF. “There are so many latrines that have been abandoned, or were not used, or got used as storage sheds. We may think it’s a good idea but if people are not convinced that it’s a good idea to use a latrine, they have an extra room.”

Many countries have made great progress in tackling open defecation, with Vietnam and Bangladesh – where more than one in three people relieved themselves in the open in 1990 – virtually stamping out the practice entirely by 2012.

The global number has fallen from 1.3 billion in 1990. But one billion people – 90 percent of them living in rural areas “continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes or in open water bodies, with no dignity or privacy”, the U.N. study said.  The practice is still increasing in 26 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria was the worst offender, with 39 million open defecators in 2012 compared to 23 million in 1990.

Denisha Sahadevan