Abstract
Clarissa Brocklehurst discusses the study by Patil and colleagues on a sanitation program in India and highlights the challenges ahead to improve the situation for millions of people who still have no option but to practice open defecation. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.
Highlights
Even more striking is the number of people who resort to the euphemisticallynamed practice of ‘‘open defecation’’, defined by the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) as ‘‘no facilities or bush or field includes defecation in the bush or field or ditch; excreta deposited on the ground and covered with a layer of earth; excreta wrapped and thrown into garbage; and defecation into surface water’’ [2]
This Perspective discusses the following new study published in PLOS Medicine: Patil SR, Arnold BF, Salvatore AL, Briceno B, Ganguly S, et al (2014) The Effect of India’s Total Sanitation Campaign on Defecation Behaviors and Child Health in Rural Madhya Pradesh: A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial
The Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank estimates that a lack of sanitation costs India US$48 per person per year, the equivalent of 6.4% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) [5]
Summary
The WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) for Water and Sanitation, which tracks progress towards the water and sanitation targets of the Millennium Development Goals, estimates that 36% of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people, lack access to an improved sanitation facility, defined by the JMP as ‘‘one that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact’’ [1]. This situation means that a large proportion of the world’s people live at risk of contamination of their environment by human fecal matter.
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