August 23, 2016
“I need the bathroom. I assume there is one, though I’m at a spartan restaurant in the Ivory Coast, in a small town filled with refugees from next-door Liberia, where water comes in buckets and you can buy towels secondhand. The waiter, a young Liberian man, only nods when I ask. He takes me off into the darkness to a one-room building, switches on the light, and leaves. There’s a white tiled floor, white tiled walls and that’s it. No toilet, no hole, no clue.”
August 23, 2016
“This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.”
August 23, 2016
“It must be, when 2.6 billion people don’t have sanitation. I don’t mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees.”
August 23, 2016
“The disease toll of this is stunning. A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. Bacteria can be beneficial: the human body needs bacteria to function, and only 10 percent of cells in our body are actually human. But plenty are malign. Small fecal particles can contaminate water, food, cutlery, and shoes, and be ingested, drunk, or unwittingly eaten.”
August 23, 2016
“Children suffer most. Diarrhea—nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water—kills a child every fifteen seconds. ”
August 23, 2016
“Diarrhea, says the UN children’s agency UNICEF, is the largest hurdle a small child in a developing country has to overcome.”
August 23, 2016
“Modern sanitation has added twenty years to the average human life. Good sanitation is also economically sensible. A government that provides adequate sanitation saves money on hospital visits avoided, and does not lose labor days to dysentery or workers to cholera. Where good sanitation exists, people are wealthier, healthier, and cleaner.”
August 23, 2016
“Rich toileted people; poor toiletless masses. Life, luxury, and health for the privileged. Disease and death and business as usual for the poor. This is the assumption the Liberian waiter relied on to make me feel embarrassed. He was entitled to it, because he was a refugee, and diarrhea probably kills more refugees—in camps, on the run—than soldiers or guerillas. But he was mistaken.”
August 23, 2016
“A fifth of Ireland’s towns are at high risk of cryptosporidium infection, according to the national environmental protection authority. Nearly half the country treats its sewage only to primary levels, which involves nothing more taxing than screening out the lumps and discharging the rest. And Ireland is not the only rich country with an infrastructure more suited to a poor one.”
August 23, 2016
“Brussels, the wealthy and powerful city that serves as the EU’s administrative seat, only began to build a treatment plant for its own sewage in 2003.”
August 23, 2016
“ In the United States—where, by the way, 1.7 million people have no sanitation—cryptosporidium in Milwaukee’s drinking water made 400,000 people sick and killed more than 100.”
August 23, 2016
“Milwaukee discharges treated sewage effluent—treated to remove some things, but not pharmaceuticals or all pathogens—into Lake Michigan, which also supplies its drinking water.”
August 23, 2016
“Since 1994, 935 million gallons of “full-strength, untreated sewage” have been poured into the lake’s waters. This is not illegal. In fact, it’s what the system is designed to do, if too much storm water overloads storage capacity at treatment works.”
August 23, 2016
“Despite the technology, the engineers and the ingenuity of modern sanitary systems, despite the shine of progress and flush toilets, even the richest, best-equipped humans still don’t know what to do with sewage except move it somewhere else and hope no one notices when it’s poured untreated into drinking water sources. And they don’t.”
August 23, 2016
“The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of denial. Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history.”
August 23, 2016
“fecal transplant is becoming an increasingly common procedure in modern medicine, used to treat severe bacterial infections such as Clostridium difficile, known by tabloids as a “superbug” because of its resistance to many antibiotic remedies. For the worst-suffering cases, doctors can now prescribe an enema—mixed with milk or saline solution—of a close relative’s disease-free feces, whose bacterial fauna somehow defeat the superbug with dramatic effect. ”
August 23, 2016
“ Newspapers are fond of anointing last taboos, but in modern civilized times the defecatory practice of humans is undeniably a candidate. Sex can be talked about, probably because it usually requires company. Death has once again become conversational, enough to be given starring roles in smart, prime-time TV dramas. Yet defecation remains closed behind the words, all chosen for their clean association, that we now use to keep the most animal aspect of our bodies in the backyards of our discourse, where modernity has decided it belongs.”
August 23, 2016
“They also borrowed gardez l’eau, commonly shouted before throwing the contents of chamber pots into the streets, and turned it into “loo.”) The French, in return, began by calling their places of defecation “English places” ”
August 23, 2016
“The easiest modern shorthand for the disposal of the disposal of human excreta—sanitation—is a euphemism for defecation which is a euphemism for excretion which is a euphemism for shitting.”
August 23, 2016
“Once I start noticing, I can’t stop. And once I start meeting the people who work in this world—who flush its sewers and build its pit latrines, who invent and engineer around our essential essence, in silence and disregard—I don’t want to. I’d rather follow Sigmund Freud, who wrote that humanity’s “wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit [shit’s] existence and dignify it as much as nature will allow.” So here goes.”
Notes From: Rose George. “The Big Necessity.” iBooks.
