Word: humanism
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Save the poop jokes, because Rose George has heard them all. When the London-based journalist decided to write a book on human waste, toilets and the world sanitation crisis, she knew that she'd be the butt of a few jokes around the pub. What she didn't realize - at least not fully - was just how important her subject was. George's new book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters delves into the taboo subject of bowel evacuation, with tact, sensitivity - and the right amount of style. Reporting on the sewers...
...toilet - and that doesn't just mean that they don't have a nice, heated indoor bathroom. It means they have nothing - not a public toilet, not an outhouse, not even a bucket. They defecate in public, contaminating food and drinking water, and the disease toll due to unsanitized human waste is staggering. George notes that 80% of the world's illnesses are caused by fecal matter: A single gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasitic cysts and 100 worm eggs. According to the estimates of one sanitation specialist George cites, each...
...idealist, invents a basic and cheap latrine, and proves that even the most destitute Indians will pay for a clean toilet. In China, George meets Wang Ming Ying, a tiny woman from the rural province of Shaanxi who promotes the use of biogas - energy created from the fermentation of human waste - which can be used for electricity and cooking fires, and helps slow the deforestation ravaging her country. In Japan, George recounts the history of Toto, maker of the world's most advanced toilets, which can do everything including check your blood pressure - and wonders why they never caught...
...what lingers after you finish reading The Big Necessity is characters like Champaben, an outcast woman from the untouchable Dalit caste in India whose job is to clean the country's dry, filthy latrines. She regularly contracts dysentery, giardiasis and brain fever from her exposure to human waste. No one deserves that fate, and as George makes clear, the very least we can do for every person on this planet is to give them a place...
...opposition party sympathetic to both the Hutu and Tutsi citizens who live in the country plagued by civil war and ethnic violence—was arrested on Nov. 3 for criticizing the president in a document found in his home, according to the global organization Human Rights Watch...