Engineer: Proper toilets will save lives

A WATER engineer in Papua New Guinea says thousands of children’s lives can be saved by people using closed toilets and paying attention to hand washing.
A rural water supply and sanitation programme engineer, Stuart Jordan, said a community-led sanitation programme had shown villages could improve their hygiene when they rea­lised what to do.
He said about four million people were using water contaminated with faeces from rivers. Water transport and storage by householders further reduced its quality.
Jordan said statistics from agencies like Unicef and WHO showed poor sanitation meant up to 4,000 children under five years were dying each year in PNG from diarrhoea.
“If you have very good hygiene education you can knock out those deaths by about 44% just with hand wash education,” he said.
“You can knock out about 35% of those deaths just by people having latrines.
“You’re talking about 75% of deaths knocked out by toilets and hand wash and this does not require a great big investment of infrastructure.”
Jordan said a recent two-day conference in Port Moresby was a very encouraging meeting of many people who were focussed on improving water quality
in PNG as European funding cuts loom next year.