World Toilet Day

Water Aid (a UK NGO): 19 November is World Toilet Day – a day to celebrate the humble, yet vitally important, toilet and to raise awareness of the global sanitation crisis. Imagine life without a toilet. No toilets in your home or at work, no public toilets, no toilets anywhere. Imagine the mess. Imagine the disease. WaterAid is working hard to change this, using simple and low cost solutions, and there are many easy and fun ways you can get involved….

* 2.5 billion people do not have somewhere safe, private or hygienic to go to the toilet.

* One gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs.

* The simple act of washing hands with soap and water after going to the toilet can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by over 40%.

* Safe disposal of children's faeces leads to a reduction of nearly 40% in childhood diarrhoea….

Outhouse photo by Lars Lentz source, Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 1.0 License