[Marxism] Send in the Latrines

[Bonnie Weinstein <giobon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Send in the Latrines

By ROSE GEORGE 

Op-Ed Contributor

May 19, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/opinion/19george.html?hp
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/opinion/19george.html?hp>

 

London

 

IT¹S the rainy season in Myanmar. It¹s also cholera season. When Cyclone
Nargis arrived two weeks ago, the waters it unleashed destroyed houses and
killed people and livestock. The storm also devastated other things that
haven¹t made the headlines, but that can mean the difference between life
and death: toilets. Even before the cyclone, 75 percent of Burmese had no
latrines. Like some 2.6 billion other people worldwide, they do their
business by roadsides, on train tracks or wherever they can. But the few
latrines that did exist in the Irrawaddy Delta are now flooded or flattened,
and their contents have seeped into already filthy waters.

 

So what? There are other priorities, aren¹t there? Food, shelter and clean
water are what aid agencies emphasize. But human excrement is a weapon of
mass destruction. A gram of human feces can contain up to 10 million
viruses. At least 50 communicable diseases ? including cholera, meningitis
and typhoid ? travel from host to host in human excrement. It doesn¹t take
much: a small child, maybe, who plays in soil where people have been
defecating, then dips his fingers in the family rice pot. The aftermath of a
disaster like Cyclone Nargis ? with masses of weakened people on the move ?
is a communicable disease paradise.

 

The priority is containment. That¹s as fancy as it sounds: With the water
table only 20 centimeters below the surface in Myanmar, it is little use to
dig pit latrines, so buckets or tanks for human waste are needed instead.
Providing such things is made harder by the refusal of Myanmar¹s government
to accept help. And it is also hampered by our unwillingness to even talk
about it.

 

In our sanitary, plumbed lives, the toilet ? an engineering marvel ? removes
waste out of sight and out of mind. As Steven Pinker recently wrote in ³The
Stuff of Thought,² the vocabulary of excretion has sneaked in and taken the
taboo place previously held by religious words, and this switch parallels
the rise of sewers and the sanitizing of excrement. A substance common to us
all, and as vital to life as breathing, has become unspeakable, and
particularly in the polite and powerful circles that could do something
about its deadly effects.

 

There¹s no place for squeamishness when ? even without complicated and
difficult disasters like Myanmar¹s ? diarrhea trails only pneumonia as the
biggest killer of small children in the world, greater than tuberculosis,
AIDS or malaria, in numbers equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every hour.

 

Humanitarian aid agencies use the shorthand ³watsan² to stand for ³water and
sanitation.² There¹s a reason those two words aren¹t in alphabetical order,
and it¹s not poetry. When it comes to prioritizing aid, water has always
received the lion¹s share of attention and money. Eddy Perez, a sanitation
expert at the World Bank¹s Water and Sanitation Program, often shows an
image of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito from the film ³Twins.² One
represents water and the other sanitation, and he doesn¹t have to spell out
which is which. Most developing countries spend less than 0.5 percent of
their gross domestic product on watsan, and only 12 percent to 15 percent of
that in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa goes to sanitation, according to the
2006 United Nations Human Development Report.

 

Celebrities like Matt Damon and Jay-Z line up to talk about water. Shiny
taps and clean water make good pictures. I¹ve never seen a movie star
pictured in front of a new latrine, though it can double its user¹s life
span.

 

Of course food and water are crucial. But feces can undermine both. If
people are eating fecal particles, no amount of high-energy biscuits will
make them well. In poor countries, diarrhea is the reason you find
malnourished children in well-fed families. It¹s why millions of girls drop
out of school, and why millions of dollars¹ worth of productivity is lost
from workers sick with this week¹s bout of dysentery.

 

Good disposal of human excreta can reduce diarrhea by 40 percent. Washing
hands reduces it still further. Health economists reckon that every dollar
invested in sanitation can save $7 on health costs and lost productivity. No
wonder the readers of The British Medical Journal last year voted sanitation
the greatest medical milestone ever, over penicillin and anesthesia.

 

In Myanmar, aid agencies are struggling to recruit Asian workers who are
more acceptable to the country¹s paranoid junta. If these people can get in,
they¹ll start dispensing buckets. These are very early stages, Patrick
McCormick, a spokesman for Unicef, told me. Everything is still chaotic. But
these early days of disaster aftermath provide the cracks into which cholera
sneaks. This year, the International Year of Sanitation, is a fine time to
address a pointless and damaging conversational taboo. Solving sanitation is
about more than semantics. But our refusal to talk about it says something
about us, and none of it good.

 

Rose George is the author of the forthcoming ³The Big Necessity: The
Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.²

 



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