Sunday, November 19, 2017

World Toilet Day

 Arne Panesar, who heads the department for sustainable sanitary provisions at the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) explained:
 "The mayor of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, for instance, said that now only 1 percent of the city's 16 million inhabitants are without toilets." But if you look at where the waste goes, things are not as rosy as the mayor paints them. Of those 16 million people, only 1 or 2 percent have securely managed sanitary provisions. That means that waste ends up in containers where it cannot be treated. The other 98 percent simply flows out of the system. Thus, human waste is simply spilled out into the street in some neighborhoods, or into streams in others. That, of course, does not aid the health of the population.

"Six in 10 people around the world live without sustainable sanitary systems,” Panesar said. "That means roughly 4.5 billion people. Furthermore, 2.1 billion have no access to safe drinking water.”

Almost 1,000 children die preventable deaths each day. Many parasites and diseases such as cholera, typhus and polio are able to spread unimpeded because of a lack of secure sanitation systems. Beyond India, a number of African countries also have problems providing citizens with sanitation systems.

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