Great stink, great disgrace

More than 1 billion people in developing countries still have no toilets and 900 million people no clean water, International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander [from DFID, the UK Department for International Development] said [on 28 Oct 2008] on the 150th anniversary of the Great Stink in London.

Douglas Alexander announced an increased effort to bring an end to the sanitation crisis in developing countries by building toilets for more than 50 million people and providing clean water to more than 25 million people in the developing world over the next five years. DFID will meet its commitment of £200 million to Africa by 2010 and maintain this until 2013.

Read more: DFID, 28 Oct 2008

Watch below the End Water Poverty’s video on The Great Stink

Developing world needs sanitation revolution

GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE, By Maggie Black

Britain’s sanitary revolution took place 150 years ago, but what is preventing so much of the developing world from catching up?

Exactly 150 years ago, an exceptionally hot spell of summer weather reduced the Thames flowing through London to a scandalous condition known as The Great Stink. Queen Victoria, travelling down the river to Millwall docks, had to contain her nausea by clamping a bouquet to her nose. The fumes were not only foul but terrifying, since they were thought to be pestilential – the source of cholera.  (…)

Read all The Hindu

Maggie Black – Creating a stink about the world’s wastewater

Exactly 150 years ago, an exceptionally hot spell of summer weather reduced the Thames flowing through London to a scandalous condition known as The Great Stink. Queen Victoria, travelling down the river to Millwall docks, had to contain her nausea by clamping a bouquet to her nose. The fumes were not only foul but terrifying, since they were thought to be pestilential – the source of cholera.

The Great Stink, with its power of concentrating MPs’ faculties, led to the introduction of legislation for the transformation of sewerage in London. An unprecedented sum for a domestic purpose, £3m, was voted for intercepting sewers to be tunnelled along the riverside by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. The act, rushed through by August 1858 was to lead to revolutions in local government and public health engineering throughout the world.

If only such action was expressed today. Great Stinks are still routinely emanated by rivers swollen with raw sewage and reduced to a trickle in the hot season in parts of Asia, Africa and Central America. But the stench does not instil the same degree of terror.

More – The Guardian