Billions of People Without Toilet Facilities

A Global Sanitation Worry

By Mofor Samuel

Since time immemorial man had very few patent problems. He was conscious of his need for food. Nature herself implanted in him the desire for food as one of the involuntary processes and urges which combine to ensure his survival.
To satisfy his food needs, he engaged in hunting animals, picking wild fruits and edible roots. To accomplish these ends, he was obliged to lead a migratory, hazardous and unstable life.
As one millennium after another passed by, man moved from the primitive existence of hunting animals, picking fruits, and digging roots into other revolutionary eras-farming, pastoralism, iron working, house building for shelter, discovery of fire and its use for cooking and warmth, and stable economic life. In these new eras, he moved from a nuclear family to clan life living in the same village or town. With these phenomena, a new set of latent and patent problems emerged, complicated by unsolved problems of thousand years ago, such as mental and moral underdevelopment, disease and lack of personal hygiene and environmental sanitation.
Presently, some 2.6 billion people worldwide, that is about half of the world’s population do not have latrines or toilet facilities. In most parts of India and the developing world, residents can be seen squatting in the open to empty their bowels. The oceans, rivers, streams, swamps, lakes, water holes, nearby bushes, open fields, markets, motor parks, school premises, footpaths, roadsides, gutters, backyards, drainage patterns and culverts, farmland, pig sty etc serve as points for defaecation.
Human faeces can be highly infective material and when wrongly disposed of, poses a serious public health threat to the population as the soil is contaminated by indiscriminate defaecation. This condition leads to such diseases as dysentery, typhoid fever; hookworm and other helminth (worm) infections. As a student on field study, this commentator had the experience of discovering that most of the houses constructed along the banks of the Koke stream in Muea, Buea subdivision, had no toilets or latrines. Another interesting discovery was that most of the landlords disappeared or incited their dogs to chase away any stranger when news went round that sanitary inspectors were to visit the vicinity. Today, certain persons do not eat vegetable cultivated in Muyuka or even drink water there because of the fear of the cholera epidemic that severely hit that town some years back.
Are you one of those who do not have access to toilet facilities, or is your council area lacking in this aspect, then there is every reason to rethink your strategy as you are exposing yourself and others to infections related to indiscriminate disposal of human faeces. The simple truth is that excreta is a waste that the body no longer needs, that is why it is disposing it in its present form. How can the body refuse something because it does not need it only for the same thing to be abandoned where it poses a serious threat to the body?
Clearly, much need to be done in the field of environmental sanitation and the training of people to publicly and personally adopt the habit of cleanliness .The standard of sanitation to be aimed at should be one that it is possible to attain in the circumstances and towards which every member of the community can be expected to strive. It is a common mistake to set too high s standard to begin with.
Design should be based on sound principles but kept simple -so that construction can be effected with the minimum of trained staff, making maximum use of locally obtained local materials. Any latrine system involves a certain amount of maintenance, but the less maintenance a system calls for the more likely is it to prove successful. Furthermore, no matter how cheap and simple a latrine system may be, it will not succeed in its objective unless there is cooperation on the part of the people, and this is most likely to succeed if they are made to understand the reason for it. It is important to remember that the type of latrine must be one which is acceptable to the people and does not offend their religious or social customs. The number of latrines provided must be adequate for the needs of the community; for they will not function satisfactorily if they are expected to serve many more people than they were designed for.
Finally, no handling of infected material is involved in a latrine in which faeces are voided directly into an excavation in the ground, and there are two forms of latrine of this type which have proved their worth over a long period of time; these are the deep trench or pit latrine and the bored-hole latrine. Neither type is expensive nor difficult to construct .And, of course, little maintenance is required