World Toilet Day may sound like a strange concept at first but when you look deeper into the basin you might understand the importance of such a day.
World Toilet Day takes place on November 19 each year and is an officially recognised global United Nations event. This day was created by the World Toilet Organisation in 2001 to create awareness around the globe on terrible health and sanitation dilemmas around the world.
Proper sanitation is a basic human right, but only two thirds of the world has regular access to a toilet, that equates to 2.5 billion people in total.
Since its inception, World Toilet Day has played a vital role in challenging governments, businesses and other groups to make changes. It has also worked towards breaking various taboos surrounding the topic, in order to facilitate discussion.
Every human being to be treated with dignity and sanitation is of extreme importance.
Here are some interesting toilet facts and sanitation facts
1) Nearly 1.5 million children under the age of five die every year from diarrhoea globally.
2) Diarrhoeal diseases are the second most common cause of death of young children in developing countries, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined, and resulting in 1 death every 20 seconds.
3) Toilets have added 20 years to the human lifespan over the past 2 centuries.
4) In rich nations, 30% of clean water is used to flush poo into sewers.
5) 1.2 billion people have no toilet, so they have to defecate in the open.
6) 40% of people worldwide don’t have a safe and healthy way to defecate.
7) 90% of diarrhoea cases are caused by food or water contaminated by faeces.
8) Facieses is responsible for more than 50% of the 9 million preventable child deaths each year.
9) The estimated number of grams of faecal matter consumed everyday by people without a toilet is 10 grams.
10) One gram of poo is home to 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasites and 100 worm eggs.
