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1-Page Summary of The Big Necessity
Overview
After children are potty trained, we don’t think much about the process of going to the bathroom. This is a big issue because sanitation is one of the biggest killers in the world and our waste disposal system isn’t efficient. Feces can be used for other things besides being flushed down the toilet or thrown away in landfills. Let’s explore how human feces can be put to good use by learning more about this little-known topic and using it as an example for something else that has been undervalued until recently.
The author will discuss the following points:
The number of children who die every year because they don’t have access to sanitation.
How a $1 investment in sanitation can give a huge return.
China’s use of their shit as fertilizer, which has helped them grow crops and feed more people than ever before.
Big Idea #1: Lack of sanitation is a huge global health problem with deadly consequences.
Most people don’t like to think about what happens when they flush the toilet. They prefer not to think about it, because they’re too busy with their lives. However, there are many people who have no such luxury and therefore must defecate in public or even plastic bags that they then discard in crowded slums.
People who live in such conditions are constantly exposed to human feces. This can result in them getting feces on their clothes and eating it, which is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, consider this fact: One out of every ten people lives with a lack of sanitation, which causes an alarming amount of disease. In fact, one out of ten illnesses worldwide can be traced back to poor sanitation practices that lead to contaminated water or food-borne illnesses from improper hygiene. That’s more than four million deaths per year!
There are a lot of germs in feces. One gram contains 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria and 1000 parasite cysts. Sanitation experts estimate that people living without sanitation consume as much feces as ten grams per day on average. As a result, approximately 90% of diarrhea is caused by contaminated food or water. This leads to one child dying every 15 seconds from diarrhea – the biggest barrier to surviving childhood for children in developing countries.
Big Idea #2: Proper sanitation can save millions of lives and billions of dollars.
Over the past 200 years, there have been a lot of important medical developments. Antibiotics and penicillin are two examples that come to mind. Birth control is another one, as well as synthetic insulin. However, when asked about which was the most important development in medicine over the last 200 years, British Medical Journal readers chose sanitation.
And sanitation isn’t the only thing that has changed over time. In fact, it’s one of the biggest medical advancements in history. It wasn’t until proper toilets, sewers and hand-washing came along that child mortality decreased by 20%. This was a drastic change from what happened before.
Diarrhea is a major problem in developing countries, as it claims the lives of 2.2 million people each year. But there’s a simple solution that could reduce diarrhea deaths by nearly 40%: Proper waste disposal to prevent contamination of water sources.
Gary Ruvkun, a Harvard geneticist, says that having a toilet can add 20 years to your life. That’s the main reason why people live longer in developed countries than in undeveloped ones.
Ruvkun:
Sanitation makes sense both economically and medically. It keeps people healthy, which saves money on medical bills and hospital visits. If we invested in sanitation, it would save us even more money than what we put into it. For example, Peru’s cholera outbreak cost the country $1 billion to contain but could have been prevented if they had made a small investment of $100 million for better sanitation systems.
