World Toilet Day

Photo courtesy: flickr, recubejim's photostream.

World Toilet Day (WTD) – are they kidding? In a word, No! Unfortunately, I am one day late in reporting World Toilet Day. I apologize, friends, because proper sanitation really is an important issue around the world; and, what better way to draw attention to the issue than World Toilet Day. It a definite attention-grabber!!

The WTD website gives us this info: "2.5 billion people worldwide are without access to proper sanitation, which risks their health, strips their dignity, and kills 1.8 million people, mostly children, a year;" and, "Because even the world's wealthiest people still have toilet problems - from unhygienic public toilets to sewage disposal that destroys our waterways."

For those of us who live in countries that allows everyone access to proper sanitation in the form of bathrooms; adequate sewage systems; water processing plants; water for cleansing and cleaning; and everything else that goes into maintaining personal hygiene, we should be grateful. Read on for a sanitation horror story.

This is excerpted from “Disease Rife As More People Squeeze Into Fewer Toilets, via IRIN Mobile.

A visit to a toilet in West Point [a neighborhood in Monrovia, Liberia] costs 2.5 US cents; the young men running the latrines said there were around 500 users a day. The facilities can be smelled 50 metres away, with the floor of each squalid cubicle 15cm deep in soiled newspaper that residents use to wipe their posteriors. Staff use gloved hands to scoop the used paper into a wheelbarrow, which they lug to the nearby river or beach to dump its contents into the water.

"The situation is just getting worse here. There are more people for fewer toilets; people just openly defecate between their houses - conditions are really bad," West Point community activist Darius Nyante told IRIN.

The WTD website gives us these staggering facts:

1. 2.5 billion people worldwide are without access to proper sanitation, which risks their health, strips their dignity, and kills 1.8 million people, mostly children, a year.
2. Diarrheal diseases kill five times as many children in the developing world as HIV/AIDS.
3. That's 5,000 children DYING EVERY SINGLE DAY.
4. Not only that, but the disease kills more children than either malaria or AIDS, stunts growth, and forces millions - adults and children alike - to spend weeks at a time off work or school, which hits both a country's economy and its citizens' chances of a better future.
5. The majority of the illness in the world is caused by fecal matter.
6. Lack of sanitation is the world's biggest cause of infection.
7. One gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs.
8. Safe disposal of children's feces leads to a reduction of nearly 40% in childhood diarrhea.

Visit the World Toilet Day website for great information and a variety of ways you can make a difference.

Via TreeHugger and worldtoiletday