Week 7 - In Sickness and In Health "Let's Talk About Crap"

Thesis: Basic sanitation MUST be a part of every plan to bring health care to the developing world. 

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. I Corinthians 12:12-13  

“You've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction.” Rose Gowan 

Rose George thinks, researches, writes and talks about sanitation. Diarrhea is a weapon of mass destruction, says the UK-based journalist and author, and a lack of access to toilets is at the root of our biggest public health crisis. In 2012, two out of five of the world’s population had nowhere sanitary to go.

The key to turning around this problem is to “stop putting the toilet behind a locked door,” says George.  Let’s drop the pretense of “water-related diseases” and call out the cause of myriad afflictions around the world -- “poop-related diseases” that are preventable with a basic toilet. Once we do, we can start using human waste for good.

George explores the problem in her book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World ofHuman Waste and Why It Matters and in a fabulous special issue of Colors magazine called "Shit: A Survival Guide."