The Big Necessity - Adventures in the World of Human Waste

Martin recently read The Big Necessity Adventures in the World of Human Waste by Rose George. A fascinating book that he highly recommends. (We heard an interview with the author on NPR awhile ago.)

From the back cover:
"Prepare to embark upon an eye-opening and unprecedented tour through the world of human waste - one of the biggest unchallenged causes of death worldwide, and, for many, to their immense cost, the last remaining taboo."

I, Liz, just started the book. And just from the introduction I want to post all kinds of quotes.

From pages 2 and 3:
" ....2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, thought not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket or box.

One sanitation specialist has estimated that people who live in areas with inadequate sanitation ingest 10 grams of faecal matter every day. Poor sanitation, bad hygiene and unsafe water - usually unsafe because it has faecal particles in it - cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. Children suffer most. Diarrhoea - nearly 90% of which is caused by faecally contaminated food or water - kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children dead from diarrhoea over the last decade exceeds all people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War. Diarrhoea, says the UN children's agency UNICEF, is the largest hurdle a small child in a developing country must overcome. It is estimated that 2.2 million people - mostly children - die from an affliction that for most Westerners is the result of a bad take-away. Public health professionals talk about water-related diseases, but that is a euphemism for the truth. These are shit-related diseases."

From page 7
"90% of the world's sewage dens up untreated in oceans, rivers and lakes, and a fair share comes from the sanitary cities supplied with sewers and treatment plants."
"Despite the technology, the engineers and the ingenuity of modern sanitary systems, despite humans still don't know what to do with sewage except move it somewhere else and hope no-one notices when it is poured untreated into drinking-water sources. And they don't."

Okay, that's all the quoting I'll do. For now. :)