Toilet habits are no laughing matter

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Toilet habits are no laughing matter

November 16, 2008 by Scrivener, Toronto Star

Would you, if given the choice, forsake a roll of paper and select a

toilet that offered a warm seat, a cleansing spray, and a waft of warm

air to gently dry the essentials?

Such a toilet, which does exist, may seem like just another device of

Japanese whimsy to confound the Western mind. Perhaps. But these

toilets, known as Washlets, are more common than computers in Japanese

households. Twenty million are in use in a country of 160 million people.

So far, however, this particular toilet has not found wide appeal in

North America. Despite the manufacturer's ad campaign – featuring

smiley faces on a series of shapely bums – it's clear that North

Americans who enthusiastically drink, bathe and swim in water are not

comfortable using it to clean their bottoms.

The world may be divided into the two ways we cling to toilet habits:

Some belong to the paper culture, some to the water culture, says Rose

, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human

Waste and Why it Matters. But the divide is not insurmountable. The

Japanese were once paper people who , after years of persuasion, have

become water people.

For , the preference is clear: Paper cultures use the least

efficient means of cleaning the dirtiest part of the body. " It's just

a habit, really, " she says on the phone from London, and not a very

effective one. " How clean are we? I suggest we're not.

" We need to question whether we can't change the way it's done, " she

adds. " Or at least improve it. "

As evidence, she cites the work of an Oxfordshire doctor who examined

the underpants of local men and found fecal contamination in nearly

all of them.

That's not to say is opposed to the conventional toilet – too

few in the world have the good fortune to use one.

" It's an amazing creation, a device we should be on our knees worshiping. "

We're lucky to have the luxury of choice. Some 2.6 billion people –

about four in 10 of the world's population – have not the remotest

access to a toilet of any kind. They defecate by train tracks, in slum

alleys and in forests, and then track excrement back into the house,

leading to the opportunity for all kinds of bacterial infections.

Women, hoping to preserve their modesty, rise in the darkness to " do

their business. " In India, where open defecation is still practised

(though with embarrassment), 180,000 tonnes of human feces are left in

the open and, the author observes, often deposited beside filthy

public toilets.

In The Big Necessity, wades into the world of human waste with

wit and enthusiasm, exploring biogas, sewers, the importance of the

privy to the health and well-being of the developing world, the sorry

decline in public washrooms in New York and London (where 47 per cent

have closed since 2000) and our squeamishness with language.

Why shouldn't public necessities be a subject of serious study, she asks.

" Anthropologists and sociologists should be infesting public

bathrooms, " she writes. " There's nothing else in human society quite

like them. Not in society, not quite out of it. Needed, but rarely

demanded. A place where all sorts of human needs and habits intersect:

fear, disgust, conversation, grooming, sex ... To be uninterested in

the public toilet is to be uninterested in life. "

Last year the British Medical Journal asked readers to vote on the

most important medical advance since 1840. Sanitation won, and for

good reason: Child mortality dropped by one-fifth once sewers, toilets

and hand washing with soap became routine in London.

In the developing world, the proper disposal of human excrement can

reduce diarrhea by nearly 40 per cent. Diarrhea still kills more

children under 5 than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria.

In villages without sanitation, learned that feces-contaminated

water was causing not only intestinal, but skin and gynecological

disorders. Poor health, linked to excrement, hinders development and

therefore prosperity in the world's poorest communities.

" It's an absolute disgrace, " says . " You have a child dying

every 15 seconds from something as banal and unthreatening – we think

– as a dose of diarrhea. "

As she writes: " How a society disposes of its human excrement is an

indication of how it treats its humans, too. " Gandhi, she recalls,

said sanitation is more important than independence.

There are conferences aplenty on water, but sanitation is often an

afterthought, says. As one United Nations publication noted,

" There's a surplus of conference activity and a deficit of action. "

There is an exception, however: the WTO conference. That's the World

Toilet Organization, which held the World Toilet and Summit Expo this

month in Macau and which attended.

The founder of the WTO is a Singaporean crusader, Jack Sim, whose goal

is to create a " united global voice " that will lead to political

pressure to improve sanitation worldwide. One proposed measure is to

establish a Global Sanitation Bond to get money from wealthy countries

to poor ones.

WTO also sponsors World Toilet Day, this Wednesday. (The UN has named

2008 the International Year of Sanitation.) Among the goals of World

Toilet Day: improve the social status of toilets and upgrade the

skills of restroom cleaners and attendants, so that their work has a

respectable status.

It's significant, says, that the Prince of Orange – heir to the

Dutch throne – was also at the WTO expo. His attendance speaks to the

fact that both sanitation and the organization itself are being taken

more seriously. The theme this year was how sanitation can be made

both more attractive to philanthropic donors and a business.

notes that even the poor will spend money on a toilet if they can be

persuaded that good sanitation will, inevitably, end up saving them money.

There's a lesson for national governments, too. A 1991 cholera

epidemic in Peru cost $1 billion to contain (and that didn't include

the huge losses in agriculture and tourism). It all could have been

prevented with $100 million spent on improved sanitation.

In the course of tramping around the world's latrines,

discovered stories of human-rights abuse: the manual scavengers in

India, for instance, whose job is to pick up other peoples' feces

either with a scrap of tin or with bare hands. Sometimes, these

untouchables, also known as Dalits, may carry baskets of excrement on

their heads, en route to the local waste dump.

It's worse when it rains, says , and the men and women whose job

this is are regularly felled by dysentery, parasitic infections and

brain fever.

At the other end is the story of farmers in China – some 15.4 million

rural households – where fuel is produced from human excrement.

Micro-organisms break down the waste in oxygen-free " digester, "

producing a gas (mostly methane and carbon dioxide) that can be used

as a fuel for cooking; the slurry that remains becomes fertilizer.

As is told on one village visit, " Human and national excreta is

now turned into treasure. "

That's the bright side of the human-waste story. The Chinese, she

concludes are probably the most at home with the subject of excrement.

We should all be so at ease.

" In 2008, it's just ridiculous we haven't sorted this out, " says

, " and have this linguistic and mental handicap about it. "

Toronto Star

http://www.healthzone.ca/health/article/537750

Book EXCERPT: 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 second-hand. 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. I go outside

to find him again and ask if he's sent me to the right place. He

smiles with sarcasm. Refugees don't have much fun but he's having some

now. " Do it on the floor. What do you expect? This isn't America! " I

feel foolish. I say I'm happy to use the bushes, it's not that I'm

fussy. But he's already gone, laughing into the darkness.

I need the bathroom. I leave the reading room of the British Library

in central London and find a `ladies,' a few yards away. If I prefer,

there's another one on the far side of the same floor, and more on the

other five floors. By 6 p.m., after thousands of people have entered

and exited the library and the toilets, the stalls are still clean.

The doors still lock. There is warm water in the clean sinks. I do

what I have to do, then flush the toilet and forget it, immediately,

because I can, and because all my life I have done no differently.

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.

- From The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and

Why It Matters, by Rose , Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company