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Happy World Toilet Day! [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-11-19  

Did you use a toilet today? If you didn’t you probably will use one soon. But did you ever take a moment to think about how important toilets are? Toilets save lives. We talk a lot about clean water, but we don’t like to talk about why the water isn’t clean in the first place.

Today, November 19th, is World Toilet Day. It’s a day to raise awareness of the importance of toilets. The World Toilet Organization is a global non-profit organization whose goal is to improve toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide.

Realising the need for a global body on the subject, Sim created the World Toilet Organization (WTO) in 2001 as a global network and service platform for toilet associations, academia, government, UN agencies and toilet stakeholders to learn from one another and leverage media and corporate support that in turn influenced governments to promote sound sanitation and public health policies. Since its inception, WTO organized 17 World Toilet Summits and two World Toilet Expo and Forum straddling Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, Beijing, Belfast, Moscow, New Delhi, Macau, Shanghai, Bangkok, Philadelphia, Durban (South Africa), Hainan China, Solo Indonesia, Kuching Malaysia, Melbourne, and Mumbai. It supports Prime Minister Modi's Swachh Bharat Mission in implementing 110 million toilets in India and President Xi China Toilet Revolution in Tourism Toilets and Rural Toilets. WTO has also built 13 blocks of Rainbow Schools Toilets in rural China.

Using Humor to Improve Public Hygiene ‘Mr. Toilet’ takes unique approach to raise awareness of serious issues

Mr. Sim notes that human excrement is a difficult topic to discuss because it is considered impolite or embarrassing, even for people working in the field, so they tend to use complicated terms like “sewage management.” Even terms like “water problems” or “toilet issues” do not convey the true sense of the issue, and the use of terms like these makes it difficult to attract people’s interest. When Mr. Sim speaks, he therefore uses common terms like “poop” and “pee” to make his speeches livelier, or poses for photos sitting on a toilet, to put people at ease and attract media attention. He originally got this idea from “Mr. Condom,” who took a similar approach to promoting the use of condoms by sex workers in Thailand. This has been successful in attracting media attention, and then when Mr. Sim mentions that one-third of the world’s people do not have toilets, the media and their consumers realize this is a serious issue and take note. He also jokes that WTO also stands for the World Trade Organization, and that he initially thought a lawsuit would bring free publicity to his organization, but that has not happened. Taking this humorous approach has meant that over the past 20 years he has been able to reach more than 2 billion people without spending any money on public relations.

Jack Sim, fighting for us all in the sanitation arena.

UNICEF - Saving Lives, One Toilet at a Time.

Around 60 percent of the world's population — 4.5 billion people — either have no toilet at home or one that doesn't safely manage human waste. Nearly 900 million people still practice open defecation. That means going into fields, forests, open bodies of water or other open spaces instead of using a toilet. Open defecation carries serious health and safety risks. Contact with human waste can cause diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, polio, diarrhea, worm infestation and malnutrition. Every day, more than 700 children under age 5 — about one every two minutes — die from diarrhea due to unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation or poor hygiene.

I hope this helps raise awareness of the importance of toilets in public health. We need to be able to talk about why the water is unhealthy before we can really provide clean, safe water.

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