How Bangladesh vanquished diarrhoea | Hacker News Reader

How Bangladesh vanquished diarrhoea

economist.com

127 pointsknown59 comments

The approach to build latrines for the poorest people then shame the "rich" into building ones for themselves is marvelously devious.

According to the article, even marriages were canceled after it was revealed that the family of one of the newly weds is without this essential status simbol.

A relative traveled to African villages. Currently, farmers shame neighbors who do not have neat & clean fields after harvest. His organization tries to turn that around; yields are better when harvest waste "fertilizes" the field. They are now "shaming" the farmers that cleanup their fields to raise the yield of the field.

> Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale University who has researched sanitation decisions, suggests that better-off people may be more likely to copy poor people than the other way round. If a wealthy person has something, you do not necessarily feel ashamed not to have it.

So the key is in shaming all but the absolute poorest. Interesting insight!

About 100 years ago in New Zealand my great great grandfather was very proud of his “WC”. Of course only guests were allowed to use it!

What does WC stand for?

Water closet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet

Thanks, I can't believe I had never heard that synonym for toilet until now!

You’ve never been to Canada, Europe, or India?

Not everyone gets the luxury of traveling around the world.

Ya, but couldn't find any toilets so just held it in whole time.

I've been to all of those places and only ever heard it called a WC or "water closet" in my high school french class.

It's fading out of use in most of Europe, as far as I can tell. My grandmother used to always say WC in Norway. I don't know of anyone in my parents generation (born around 1950) or younger that'd use it. We're mostly all familiar with it still though.

It’s still pretty common in at least Germany and Austria, but is superseded by „Toilette“.

In Finnish WC morphed at some point into a proper Finnish word, ”Vessa”.

In Norway in formal use it was superseded by "toalett". In informal use "do" is also pretty common. I don't know the etymology of that.

German and Austrian inspection toilets terrify me.

We don't really say that in Canada.

Not common in Canada at least not in the twentyfirst century. I’m from western Canada and have visited most other provinces.

It's also another way to say bathroom in Serbian! I had no idea other languages used it, too.

Very common across Europe. I'd say almost universal.

I was introduced to the term by Anne Frank's diary.

It is a common German word too.

The only place I remember seeing it is in The Diary of Anne Frank. I'd guess it's on British tv/radio, too.

Is English your mother tongue?

In South America, people use WC, Patent (because it was written on the loo), or just Water (in Uruguay, at least) a lot. So it would be funny if (at least WC) was not as known in the English-speaking world. Patente (used in Brazil) is obviously just derived from the Patent label.

Italians use "water" (spelled váter") or WC (spelled "vee-chee"), rarely "tazza" or the less elegant "cesso".

In Brazil, WC is pronounced "ve-ce". And "water" in Uruguay is "guater".

In Germany, Crapper manufactured toilet bowls are still common.

WC is extremely common in Turkey too.

I think it would be pretty easy to go through life in the US without ever hearing a toilet called a WC; I'm familiar with the abbreviation but I'm not even sure how, because I can't remember ever hearing or reading it.

I've seen the abbreviation used on building plans in USA, in the past ten years. It did seem out of place, but all architects have some screwy habit that makes their plans more difficult to read.

According to my grandfather, when he was growing up poor in southern Illinois in the 1930s, "toilet" was a crude word and people said "W.C." to be polite. Outhouses were more common than toilets, to the extent that old-timers then thought it was disgusting to defecate in the same building where one slept. Perhaps "water closet" seemed an appropriately exotic term.

Never heard of a loo being called "Patente" in Brazil. Guessing it is a very specific regional thing? Also, "WC" as synonim for a bathroom as read in signs is not as common as once was. Word is "Sanitário" pretty much everywhere now.

Apparently, this word started in Londrina, as they had toilets imported from England that had PATENTED written on them. But it is used in all the southern states at least.

It's faded out of use. My grandmother even had a joke about someone asking about a WC and getting a description of the local wesleyan chapel.

Here's a version, but I don't think my grandmother's relied on foreign language as a device: http://www.brinkmanonline.com/humor/church/wc.html

Interesting, I’m from the US and I’ve never heard WC (or seen it in a toilet come to think of it)

Somewhat similar story is a movie plot for a recent popular bollywood movie: "Toilet, Ek Prem Katha" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet%3A_Ek_Prem_Katha

When I was growing up in Bangladesh in the early 90s, the only channel on TV had continuous ads for Orsaline (Pedialyte in the US) and what to do if you didn't have (or couldn't afford) it when your child was ill.

I have long since left Bangladesh, but it warms my heart to see that the the grassroots campaign paid off in droves.

Interesting that the article doesn't mention Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus. In order to be eligible for his micro loans people had to commit to building a toilet/WC/loo amongst other things. Given that approx. 140 mio people in Bangladesh borrowed micro loans from him he must have had some influence on it.

> Given that approx. 140 mio people in Bangladesh borrowed micro loans from him he must have had some influence on it.

That's a little far fetched. I am one of the 140 mil and I do not recall borrowing from him (or anyone I know). As novel as the idea of micro financing is, realistically it has little impact on poverty reduction in Bangladesh, the RMG and manpower export sector has more stake in the claim.

The sanitation revolution can be attributed to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed[0], the founder of BRAC[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazle_Hasan_Abed [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAC_(organization)

A similar story is detailed in a booked called The Power of Moments. In particular, they focus on the shaming that they do to change behavior

Can someone summarize? I could only read the 1st paragraph before ads froze up my browser.

They built outhouses so people weren't defecating wherever else they were before.

Misc: Bangladesh is a leader in health technology. There is a place in Bangladesh called "Matlab" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matlab_(Bangladesh) ). Bacteria from a pit toilet travel less than 10 feet through dirt. An organization called "BRAC" (http://www.brac.net/) deserves a Nobel prize. More about BRAC: https://www.smu.edu.sg/perspectives/2012/06/26/tale-two-ngos...

http://archive.is/CXkTA

This extension is excellent and works on mobile if you have Android Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

If you're on iOS, Brave has an ad blocker built in.

I have uBlock and the paywall still came up; "private" browsing mode worked though.

Windows Phone. A lot of great things about the platform has kept me using it, but modern (aka bloated) websites aren't too great these days.

Works well with Firefox Focus

“In Matlab, a part of Bangladesh with good data, deaths from diarrhoea and dysentery have dropped by about 90% since the early 1990s (see chart).”

I just kept reparsing and trying to error correct that sentence over and over until it finally sunk in that yes, they are saying Matlab is actually the name of a place in Bangladesh.

I came back just to say the same! It is fascinating.

And Matlab has access to good data.

Well of course it does, it's a lab!

More interesting, I believe it is the Arabic word (متطلب) which means Requirement, or possibly Farsi مطلب which means Subject or Question.

https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%B7%D9%84...

https://translate.google.com/#fa/en/%D9%85%D8%B7%D9%84%D8%A8

Conversationally it's used more like Meaning. https://translate.google.com/#hi/en/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4...

In Farsi, it is used similarly, as in Subject Matter/Topic.

In Urdu, matlab can mean intent or purpose, probably derived from Farsi.

I saw the same sentence and immediately thought it was funny (because Matlab with bad data produces poor results). I'm sure that the reporter has no idea there's a software product by that name and so including the fact that this city has good data didn't seem odd at all.

> I just kept reparsing and trying to error correct that sentence over and over until it finally sunk in that yes, they are saying Matlab is actually the name of a place in Bangladesh.

I'm Bengali, and I looked up the spelling of the name. It looks like it's spelled মতলব, which means it's pronounced more like "Motlobe" (the second "o" is halfway between "lob" and "lobe"). It means "plan" or "project", which I'm guessing refers to some attempt at creating a township at some point (or being named after a place that was).

For reasons, Bengali words are often transliterated in the Sanskrit form, which means that the spelling doesn't really always represent their actual pronunciation. (This is why people often have a harder time pronouncing my name when they see it spelled out in English, because the final syllable is transliterated according to Sanskrit, but pronounced differently. It's sort of like -ough as a suffix in English.)

And I can imagine a small techie tourism trade for people who want to say, "Yeah. I've been to Matlab. For two weeks, I breathed it, ate in it, and slept in it."

Can we get a flag for pay-walled/register only content on posts and a checkbox in settings on our profile to hide these posts?

Not sure why you got downvoted. It seems like a very pragmatic and helpful feature.

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