'The Big Necessity'

I should have my blogger's licensed revoked for not weighing in on my favorite Super Bowl commercials, but I've been too entrenched in this new book by Rose George, "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters," to do any posting, much less any posting that would just be adding to the pile of excrement already written about million dollar advertisements.
That may seem a little harsh. And it is. But if you read this book, you'll understand why we can't be bothered with analyzing how Frito-Lay decided to get us to buy Doritos during this recession.
I'd love to have you over and read the book to you, but for now we'll settle for a few statistics:
* 2.6 billion people in this world don't have sanitation. As George puts it, "I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a very safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to a latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing."
* Poor sanitation causes one in ten of the world's illnesses.
* Diarrhea kills a child every 15 seconds. More children have died from diarrhea (90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water) in the last decade than have died in all armed conflict since World War II.
* There are 1.8 million child deaths each year related to the lack of clean water and sanitation.
* It would cost $95 billion to provide sanitation to those 2.6 billion without any by 2015, but the investment would save $660 billion in future costs.
How's that grab you?
I don't mean to be a downer or misrepresent George's book. It's more than just child death and disease statistics. At times, it's funny, and provides some interesting historical and cultural tidbits about that thing we do that we're not supposed to talk about. There's also a very interesting chapter about the development of high-tech toilets in Japan.
OK, got to go.