One Billion People Still Practise Open Defecation, Endangering Public Health: UN

[HuffingtonPost]

By Tom Miles                

GENEVA, May 8 (Reuters) - One billion people worldwide still  practise "open defecation" and they need to be told that this  leads to the spread of fatal diseases, U.N. experts said on  Thursday at the launch of a study on drinking water and  sanitation.                

"'Excreta', 'faeces', 'poo', I could even say 'shit' maybe,  this is the root cause of so many diseases," said Bruce Gordon,  acting coordinator for sanitation and health at the World Health  Organization.                

Societies that practice open defecation - putting them at  risk from cholera, diarrhoea, dysentry, hepatitis A and typhoid  - tend to have large income disparities and the world's highest  numbers of deaths of children under 5 years old.                

Attempts to improve sanitation among the poorest have long  focused on building latrines, but the United Nations says that  money literally went down the toilet. Attitudes, not  infrastructure, need to change, it said.                

"In all honesty the results have been abysmal," said Rolf  Luyendijk, a statistician at the U.N.'s children's fund UNICEF.                

"There are so many latrines that have been abandoned, or  were not used, or got used as storage sheds. We may think it's a  good idea but if people are not convinced that it's a good idea  to use a latrine, they have an extra room."                

Many countries have made great progress in tackling open  defecation, with Vietnam and Bangladesh - where more than one in  three people relieved themselves in the open in 1990 - virtually  stamping out the practice entirely by 2012.                

The global number has fallen from 1.3 billion in 1990. But  one billion people - 90 percent of them living in rural areas -  "continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes or in open water  bodies, with no dignity or privacy", the U.N. study said.                

The practice is still increasing in 26 countries in  sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria was the worst offender, with 39  million open defecators in 2012 compared to 23 million in 1990.                                

INDIA NO.1                

Although the prevalence of open defecation is in decline, it  is often common in fast-growing populations, so the total number  of people doing it is not falling so fast, or is even rising.                

The country with the largest number of public defecators is  India, which has 600 million. India's relatively "hands off"  approach has long been at odds with the more successful strategy  of neighbouring Bangladesh, which has put a big focus on  fighting water-borne diseases since the 1970s, Luyendijk said.                

"The Indian government did provide tremendous amounts,  billions of dollars, for sanitation for the poorest," he said.                

"But this was disbursed from the central level to the  provinces and then all the provinces had their own mechanisms of  implementing. And as their own data showed, those billions of  dollars did not reach the poorest," added Luyendijk.                

India's government has now woken up to the need to change  attitudes, he said, with a "Take the poo to the loo" campaign  that aims to make open defecation unacceptable, helped by a  catchy Youtube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_peUxE_BKcU                

"What is shocking in India is this picture of someone  practising open defecation and in the other hand having a mobile  phone," said Maria Neira, director of Public Health at the WHO.                

Making the practice unacceptable has worked in more than 80  countries, the U.N. says. The goal is to eliminate the practice  entirely by 2025. Poverty is no excuse, the study said, noting  the role of cultural differences.                

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 14 percent of the  population are open defecators. But where the head of the  household is an Animist, the figure is twice as high, at 30  percent. Among households headed by Jehovah's Witnesses, it is  only 9 percent.          (Editing by Gareth Jones)
Source: huffingtonpost.com