Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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I can't think of the last time I saw a headline on the front page of HN about the importance of solving open defecation. I see headlines about creating new treatments for super bugs pretty regularly.

Open defecation costs $US260b globally

https://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/open-defecation-...

Price to pay: Antibiotic-resistant infections cost $2 billion a year

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/03/price-pay...

We basically know how to solve open defecation: build toilets and sewage systems.

I think we could largely solve open defecation in five years if we really wanted to. But we aren't throwing resources at it like crazy because it isn't a "sexy" issue and because first world wealthy people don't see it as directly relevant to their lives. They see it as "being nice to poor people in developing nations," not as an urgent global priority because it's fueling the creation of antibiotic resistant infections which can be exported within 24 hours to their country by someone jumping on a plane before they are symptomatic.

And I really can't recall ever seeing a headline explicitly linking the two things. But they are linked.

http://resistancecontrol.info/2017/prevention-first-tackling...

That's probably because Bill & Melinda issued their grants a few years back. You can see a list of all of the high-tech outhouse makers here [0]. Many of the designs are out in the field for long-term testing.

[0]https://stepsforsanitation.org/innovation-center/

Or maybe it's because you don't see articles about open defecation posted here all that much.

I can find two. One from two years ago and one from six years ago.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+defecation

If you search on toilet, there's a lot more articles that come up, but at first glance, most don't appear to be about solving open defecation, though there is one on the front page of the search about the Gates foundation funding toilet research.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

In contrast, you can put in antibiotic resistant and limit it to the past year and get pages of hits. Granted, they won't all be about the latest sexy research methods.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

There's one more. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20730146 from six months ago is titled "California’s Biggest Cities Confront a ‘Defecation Crisis’" and deals with "excrement on the sidewalks of San Francisco".

It has 159 comments, probably because of how it affects "first world wealthy people".

I come from a country with serious sewage issues. Most of it is government operated sewage works that are just not maintained and were due for upgrade 10-20 years ago. The issue is also an order of magnitude worse in some areas than in others.

The Gates Foundation is not relevant here, in that problem field, in any meaningful way. It is an issue about operational structure and unit cost structure. Tax money gets spent on black Mercedes cars instead of what it is supposed to be spent on.

Also, it is not a technological issue at all. In terms of tech for sewage treatment, the path forward is clear. In terms of politics it is not.

It is my (albeit limited) understanding that the Gates grants are focused on providing toilets to areas where there previously were none and not on replacing crumbling infrastructure. They're trying to get facilities to the millions of people who have to poop in the bushes because that's all there is.

That's not the issue. The issue is that there are sewage systems that dump raw sewage into rivers. Toilets are more of a nod to human decency than environmental issues.

But if Bill would like to phone me, then I would explain to him that while decency does score high in my books, you can have perfect golden toilets that dump sewage into rivers. In that case I would rather take a veldtie in the bushes.

Bill Gates did a lot of funding for developing low cost toilets for developing countries. There is a documentary called "Bill Gates Mind" on Netflix that talks about it.

I think those links look interesting, can't speak for the rest of HN. If you don't want to post them, can I? (specifically that last one?)

Have at it.

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