[pbsds bumper] the average person gets rid of approximately 130 grams of poop every day. maybe twice that much if they’ve had tacobell. seven and a half billion of us on earth? that’s a literal mountain of human poopevery day. yet most of *us* get to pretend it doesn’texist, all thanks to an invention that has improved health and quality of life more thanany other in humanity’s history. [open bumper] bears do it in the woods, whales do it in
the ocean, and 2.4 *billion* of us don’tdo it in a toilet. dysentery, typhoid, parasites, and other infectionslead to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, all because one in three people alivein 2017 don’t have access to toilets and latrines. from on top of our porcelain thrones, we’veleft a lot of our species drowning in feces. nearly a *billion* people still defecate outin the open: in street gutters, open water, or… in the woods. thousands of years ago, we all did it thatway, but as we developed agriculture and settled into towns, poop started piling up.
around five thousand years ago, neolithicvillagers constructed the first known toilets at skara brae. at the same time, many houses in mohenjo daro,featured toilets complete with drains, people washed their poop into sewers that emptiedinto the indus river. it’d be thousands of years before we linkedgerms to disease, but avoiding filth has deep evolutionary roots. bodily excretions, death, and rotten smellscan be signs of danger or disease, triggering our innate sense of disgust. this biological instinct ended up in the moralcodes of many religions, like this passage
from the old testament instructing the hebrewsto do their exodus in a… hole-y fashion. roman society was comfortable with caca. at one point, rome had 144 public toilets…long open benches that emptied into the cloaca maxima, a sewer system that carried wasteto the tiber river. but the vast majority of romans simply poopedin a pot and threw it into the street. as waste and disease piled up, romans pointedto the stink as the cause of sickness. after the roman empire faded away, this connectionbetween bad air and bad health persisted, clogging up toilet innovation for more thana thousand years. during medieval outbreaks like the plague,doctors wore pointed masks, filled with strong
herbs or perfumes to “cleanse†bad air,which they believed to be the cause of disease. they were wrong, but this obsession with stinkwould change the world in ways no one saw coming. contrary to popular belief, thomas crapperdidn’t invent the flush toilet. that honor goes to john harington, his “ajaxâ€device emptied the bowl with water from an overhead tank. but flush toilets didn’t catch on until1775, when alexander cummings revolutionized the way we poo by adding a water-filled “strap†to block explosive, and supposedly disease-causing sewer gas from rising up thepipes, the same basic toilet design we still
use today. during the industrial revolution, most people’sbusiness still ended up in streets and cesspools, and the growing population was too big a loadfor london’s sewers. by the mid-1800s, the city was literally overflowingwith crap. with crap comes cholera, an infection frombacteria whose toxins basically cause all the water in your body to pour out of yourbutt in the form of diarrhea, death by dehydration. cholera hit london in 1854. instead of the “old bad air†theory, adoctor named john snow believed cholera was transmitted by drinking water tainted withsewage.
snow’s map of cholera cases clustered arounda water pump. when he when he removed the pump’s handle,new cholera cases fell. soon after, london enclosed its sewers anddiverted waste downstream of london, but doctors wouldn’t totally accept snow’s ideas fornearly 50 years. the great depression saw an expansion of sewagetreatment plants–and modern toilet paper!–and this is basically the sanitation system wehave today, where magical chairs make nasty things disappear, out of sight, out of smell,and out of mind. it’s no three sea shells but we've come a long way. …and this privileged pooping existence letsus keep something else out of mind: the 2.4
billion people who still don’t have toilets. nearly 800,000 children under 5 still dieevery year from diarrhea. more than aids, more than malaria. that’s an airbus a380 full of children crashingevery 6 hours. it’s estimated last year poor sanitationcost the global economy $260 billion, due to illness, loss of income, and years of lifelost. worse, women suffer these impacts disproportionatelyto men. in 2007, readers of the bmj voted “modernsanitation†as the #1 medical advance since 1840.
not antibiotics, not vaccines. toilets and clean water. we *have* made progress. since 1990, 14% more people have access tosanitation, and *many* fewer are dying, but fewer is not zero. with a little effort, we can *wipe* this problemfrom the earth. on the tv show “the brady bunchâ€, theirbathroom didn’t even have a toilet. pooping is so taboo, it was *literally* invisible. we can’t even talk about it!
it’s no coincidence that many of our worstswear words involve defecation. in her book the big necessity, rose georgewrites: “how a society disposes of its human excrement is an indication of how it treatsits humans too†everybody poops, and every person who is bornshould be able to do it safely. stay curious! and please… always wash your hands when you’re done. hey everyone, as always, thank you for watchingand learning with us. this week’s video was a stinky but importantsubject, and it was brought to you thanks
to the support of bill and melinda gates. for years, bill and melinda gates have supportedefforts around the world to make people healthier and make their lives better through innovation,education, and investing in projects to build a better future. and it’s working! since 1990, an estimated **122 million** children’slives have been saved, thanks to things like better nutrition, family planning, economicopportunities, and vaccines. here’s some proof: in 1988 there were morethan 350,000 cases of polio. and last year?
only 34. things have gotten a lot better, and one daysoon, that number *can be, and will be zero*. but whether it’s bringing toilets to 2.4billion people, or erasing the last few cases of polio, progress only happens when the privilegedpay attention. go to gatesletter.com to read bill and melindagates’ annual letter, and find out all the ways life has and will continue to improvefor the world’s poorest i’ll see you next time.
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