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Thursday March 28, 2024

World Toilet Day observed

By Myra Imran
November 20, 2018

Islamabad: As part of his ‘Clean and Green Campaign,’ when Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan announced that people would be asked to send in pictures of dirty toilets and action would be taken against those responsible, there was a huge outcry on social media making fun of this announcement. He was taunted and bullied for his vision. The response goes to show how unaware general public is about the importance of sanitation especially availability and cleanliness of toilets.

As world commemorates World Toilet Day on Monday, Pakistan is ranked seventh worst country in terms of access to basic sanitation, as its 42 per cent of the population remains without access to basic sanitation. A report by WaterAid says 79 million people lack a decent toilet, while 37 per cent have no system for wastewater disposal, which leads to spread of diseases due to contamination of water and contact with human waste.

The public washrooms are almost non-existent and where available, such facilities are hub of diseases. As you enter a toilet at any public place, be it Motorway Rest Areas, restaurant, educational institutions or even a government office, the situation of cleanliness and lack of sanitation facilities tells volumes about the administration’s seriousness towards this major health hazard.

“Dirty toilets and lack of sanitation facilities in the toilets make these facilities a center of thousands of diseases ranging from Urinary Tract Infections to Diarrhea, Dysentery, Hepatitis and all infectious diseases that can be transmitted from one person to the other,” said a General Practitioner Ammarah Anwar while talking to ‘The News’.

She said that due to absence of soap in majority of public toilets, people tend to stay with dirty hands and spread the germs wherever they go through Fecal Oral Route, particular route of transmission of a disease where pathogens in fecal particles pass from one person to another person. Diseases caused by fecal-oral transmission include diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, polio and hepatitis.

“Even if you don’t use the toilets of a restaurant because it is dirty, diseases can be transmitted by the person serving you food if he or she has not washed hands properly through soap,” she explained while talking about how Fecal Oral Route works. A Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Factsheet released by WaterAid on World Water Day shows that hand washing with soap reduces 23 to 40 per cent sickness due to diarrhea, 16 to 21 per cent respiratory illness like cold amongst the general population and 29 to 57 per cent absenteeism due to gastrointestinal illness in school children.

The story of this important health aspect that looks funny to some doesn’t end here. According to the latest Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef) and the World Health Organisation, 27,000 children die each year from diarrhea related diseases in Pakistan.

The report portrays a bleak picture of Pakistan in terms of sanitation and highlights that due to open defecation the country continues to face major health and nutritional consequences. In Pakistan open defecation is one of the major contributors of stunting among children as the current prevalence rate of stunting is 45 per cent — which is worrisome. It says that in Pakistan just under half or 48 per cent of the population is using improved sanitation facilities, 6.0 per cent of population is using shared sanitation facilities and 23 per cent of the population is using other unimproved sanitation facilities.

On this important and often neglected day, Pakistan can take pride in the five-year long “Clean and Green Pakistan” campaign in which prime minister, president, governors, and chief ministers plan to take the lead in cleaning the country.