The average person gets rid of approximately 130 grams of poop every day. There are 7.5 billion of us on Earth. That's a literal mountain of human poop everyday. Yet most of us get to pretend it doesn't exist, all thanks to an invention that has improved health and quality of life more than any other in humanity's history.
Bears do it in the wood, whales do it in the ocean and 2.4 billion of us don't do it in a toilet. Dysentery, typhoid, parasites, and other infections lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, all because one in the three people alive in 2017 don't have access to toilets and latrines. From on top of our porcelain thrones, we've left a lot of our species drowning in feces. Nearly a billion people still defecate out in the open: in street gutter, open water, or in the woods. Thousands of years ago, we all did it that way, but as we developed agriculture and settled into towns, poop started piling up.
Around 5,000 years ago, Neolithic villagers constructed the first known toilets at Skara Brae. At the same time, many houses in Mohenjo Daro, featured toilets complete with drains, people washed their poop into sewers that emptied into the Indus River.
Toilet at Mohenjo Daro
Toilet at Skara Brae
It'd be thousands of years before we linked germs to disease, but avoiding filth has deep evolutionary roots. Bodily excretions, death, and rotten smells can be signs of danger or disease, triggering our innate sense of disgust. This biological instinct ended up in the moral codes of many religions, like a passage from the Old Testament instructing the Hebrews to do their Exodus in a holy fashion.
Roman society was comfortable with Caca. At one point, Rome had 144 public toilets, long open benches that emptied into the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer system that carried waste to the Tiber River. But a vast majority of Romans simply pooped in a pot and threw it on the streets. As waste and disease piled up, Romans pointed to the stink as the cause of sickness. After the Roman Empire faded away, this connection between bad air and bad health persisted, clogging up toilet innovation for more than a thousand years.
Ancient Roman Toilet
During medieval outbreaks like the Plague, doctors wore pointed masks, filled with strong herbs or perfumes to "cleanse" bad air, which they believed to be the cause of the disease. They were wrong, but this obsession with stink would change the world in ways no one saw coming.
Contrary to popular belief, Thomas rapper didn't invent the flush toilet. That honor goes to John Harington, his "Ajax" device empties the bowl with water from an overhead tank. But flush toilets didn't catch on until 1775, when Alexander Cummings revolutionized the way we poop by adding a water-filled "S trap" to block explosive, and supposedly disease-causing sewer gas from rising up the pipes, the same basic toilet design we still use today.
During the Industrial Revolution, most people's business still ended up in streets and cesspools, and the growing population was too big a load for London's sewer. By the mid-1800s, the city was literally overflowing with crap. With crap comes cholera, an infection from bacteria whose toxins basically cause all the water in your body to pour out of your butt in the form of diarrhea, death by dehydration. Cholera hit London in 1854. Instead of the "old bad air" theory, a doctor named ohn Snow believed cholera was transmitted by drinking water tainted with sewage. Snow's map of cholera cases clustered around a water pump. When he removed the pump's handle, new cholera cases fell. Soon after, London enclosed it's sewers and diverted waste downstream of London, but doctors wouldn't totally accept Snow's ideas for nearly 50 years.
The Great Depression saw an expansion of sewage treatment plants, and a modern toilet paper, and this is basically the sanitation system we have today, where magical chairs make nasty things disappear, out of sight, out of smell, and out of mind. We've come a long way and this privileged pooping existence lets us keep something else out of mind: the 2.4 billion people who still don't have the toilets. Nearly 800,000 children under 5 still die every year from diarrhea. That's more than AIDS and Malaria. It's estimated last year poor sanitation cost the global economy $260 billion, due to illness, loss of income, and years of life lost. Worse, women suffer these impacts disproportionately to men. In 2007, readers of British Medical Journal voted modern sanitation as the Number 1 medical advancement since 1840. Not antibiotics, not vaccines but toilets and clean water. We have made progress.
Since 1990, 14% more people have access to sanitation, and many fewer are dying, but fewer is not zero. With a little effort, we can wipe this problem from the Earth. In her book, The Big Necessity, Rose George writes, "How a society disposes of it's human excrement is an indication of how it treats it's humans too." Everybody poops, and every person who is born should be able to do it safely.
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