Sanitation Updates

Cyclone Nargis destroyed not only houses and killed people and livestock. The storm also devastated toilets.

So what? There are other priorities, aren’t 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.

The priority is containment. That’s 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 Myanmar’s government to accept help. And it is also hampered by our unwillingness to even talk about it.

Humanitarian aid agencies use the shorthand “watsan” to stand for “water and sanitation.” There’s a reason those two words aren’t in alphabetical order, and it’s not poetry. When it comes to prioritizing aid, water has always received the lion’s share of attention and money.

Read more - Rose George, NYTimes.com