More people around the world have a cell phone than a toilet. Even as people the world over embrace the latest technology trends, one billion of them still don’t have access to something as basic as a toilet. Not having a toilet increases the likelihood of contracting life-threatening diseases - and dying of completely treatable ones, too. The public health issues are myriad - and not always obvious, but defecating in the open isn’t exactly the stuff of stuff of polite conversation.
It’s not the stuff of polite conversation, but here in the 21st century, fully 1 BILLION people- 15% of the world’s population, must defecate openly due to lack of access to toilets. Think about that for a moment- roughly one out of every seven people on Earth don’t have access to a toilet, something those of us in the West take for granted- to the point where we don’t even think about it. Toilets are just…there, whenever we need one.. I’m not certain I could even envision what life would be like without something that we take so thoroughly for granted. Virtually anywhere in this country, if you have to go, the odds are very good you’ll be able to find a toilet.
Now imagine a place where you have no access to toilet facilities. Anywhere. And not having access to toilets doesn’t mean that human bodily functions magically get put on hold. If you’ve ever gone camping, you’ve experience the joys of have to go to the bathroom au naturel. I’m reminded of Jeff Goldblum’s line from The Big Chill, in which he drops his zipper, urinates openly, and muses about admiring the great outdoors because “it’s one big toilet.” For much of the Third World, the outdoors IS one big toilet…and therein lies the problem. When human waste is excreted in the open, the risk of serious- yet easily preventable- diseases increases exponentially.
The impact of a lack of toilet facilities- and with it, clean water- is something that has a tremendous deleterious effect on public health. Among the problems:
- Women die in childbirth because of lack of access to clean water
- Dirty water and a lack of sanitation is a major culprit behind higher infant and child mortality (10 million under the age of five since 2000) due to dysentery and diarrhea
- Diarrhea kills more children than HIV/AIDS, measles, and malaria combined
- Every 20 seconds, a child dies from poor sanitation
- 2.5 BILLION people don’t have access to toilet facilities that “hygienically separate human excreta from human contact”
- One out of 10 girls in Africa will miss school during their period and eventually drop out altogether
- Research in India has shown that 94% of women interviewed had faced violence or harassment when looking for a place to openly defecate; 1/3 of those women report being assaulted
- Women and girl spend 97 billions hours a year looking for places to defecate
- 10% of the global disease burden could be prevented by improving sanitation and hygiene- particularly in the Third World
- A human being is more likely to own a cell phone than to have or have access to a toilet (In India, half of all homes have phones but no toilet)
If you’ve seen the movie, Slumdog Millionaire, what you saw was but a small sampling of the problem. When people don’t have access to toilet facilities, the end result is that they also don’t have access to clean water necessary for proper hygiene and sanitation. What they will have access to is a greater risks of diseases like diarrhea and dysentery- eminently preventable diseases that can also turn deadly.
Tuesday was “World Toilet Day,” and though it may seem odd to have a day for something that’s such a basic part of everyday life, lack of toilets remains a significant problem (with a simple solution) throughout much of the Third World.
The next time you think about where to send a charitable donation, you might want to give some thought to giving to an organization that works to provide toilets to parts of the world that have none.
