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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Sanitation

News, comment and features on sanitation in the developing world, including toilets, handwashing, and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) 

June 2024

  • Sophie Wilkinson

    Germany has come clean about the state of its public toilets. Why can’t Britain?

    Sophie Wilkinson
    The country’s first School Toilet Summit was held this month to improve public facilities. Instead of sneering, let’s join them, says freelance journalist Sophie Wilkinson

May 2024

  • Staphylococcus aureus bacteria

    Huge number of deaths linked to superbugs can be avoided, say experts

    Models suggest deaths in poorer countries could be cut by 18% – or about 750,000 a year – with preventive measures

January 2024

  • Alberte Lauridsen

    Look at this beautiful Japanese toilet and tell me – why is Britain so useless at public loos?

    Alberte Lauridsen
    Our once vast network of civic lavatories has been abandoned, says architect Alberte Lauridsen

December 2023

  • Devi Sridhar

    It’s not just bullets and bombs. I have never seen health organisations as worried as they are about disease in Gaza

    Devi Sridhar
    A quarter of its Gaza’s population could die within a year due to outbreaks caused by this unprecedented conflict, says Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

October 2023

  • Aerial view of HM Prison Long Lartin, Worcestershire.

    Jail cells without toilets persist in England despite ‘slopping out’ law

    Prisoners in some facilities forced to defecate in buckets overnight, a practice outlawed in 1996

August 2023

  • A woman next to a public toilet in India

    Bindeshwar Pathak, ‘toilet man’ who revolutionised sanitation in India, dies at 80

    Sociologist made it his mission to install more than 1m toilets after being horrified by the work of manual scavengers

March 2023

  • Local NGO workers serve Iftar food in a camp for internally displaced people in Mogadishu, Somalia. This year, Ramadan coincides with the longest drought on record in Somalia.

    The Guardian view on a water crisis: targets need to be binding

  • Man puts empty water containers back on a truck in Caracas, Venezuela.

    Number of city dwellers lacking safe water to double by 2050

February 2023

  • One man standing looking downwards, another man sitting on a chair

    The splashback scandal: should all men sit down to urinate?

    The Germans call them Sitzpinklers, and more and more men are now taking the weight off their feet in the bathroom. It could be good for their health – and help protect the family toothbrushes

November 2022

  • Starbucks logo seen on a storefront

    Starbucks under pressure to keep restrooms open to public

    American Restroom Association is marking World Toilet Day on 19 November by calling on the coffee brand to ‘let the people go!’

November 2021

  • HOOKWORM<br>LOWNDES COUNTY, AL – JULY 10, 2017: Carlos Rush, 12, stands near the pipes that carry sewage from a relative's nearby trailer home into the woods, approximately thirty feet from the backdoor. A recent study conducted by Baylor University suggests that nearly one 1 in 3 people in Lowndes County have hookworm, a parasite normally found in poor, developing countries. Below ground septic tanks are common in Lowndes, but due to the chalky clay soil throughout much of the Black Belt they septic tanks are prone to backup into people’s homes during heavy rains. With failing or absent municipal sewage systems in the county, many families choose to live with open sewer systems of PVC pipe, pumping raw sewage into nearby streams or even open land as nearby as thirty feet from the door. CREDIT: Bob Miller for The Guardian

    America's dirty divide
    DoJ to investigate Alabama’s sewage failures over possible discrimination

  • Sisters Monica and Veronica Reyes Ibarra in front of their home in the Rancho Vista community near San Marcos, Texas.

    America's dirty divide
    A deadly parasite that burrows into the body through bare feet could be multiplying in this US community

May 2021

  • Residents of Susan's Bay outside a building

    After the inferno: Sierra Leone’s poorest struggle to recover from slum fire – in pictures

    A blaze ripped through the overcrowded settlement of Susan’s Bay in Freetown in March. Photographer Henry Kamara documents the aftermath

April 2021

  • The Foreign Office minister Wendy Morton

    UK to slash funding for overseas water and sanitation projects by 80%

    Scale of aid cut emerges in leaked FCDO memo, prompting experts to describe it as ‘a national shame’

February 2021

  • Durdle Door in Dorset, Britain

    Pass notes
    What a dump! Why ‘wild toileting’ has become a big pandemic problem

    The number of people doing their business alfresco has shot up. But what else can you do when nature calls and there aren’t any public loos?

December 2019

  • Close-Up Of Tissue Papers On Hand Dryers Against Tile Wall<br>GettyImages-667779517

    The Audio Long Read
    Best audio long reads of 2019: Hand dryers v paper towels

    For a century, the humble paper towel has dominated public toilets. But a new generation of hand dryers has sparked a war for loo supremacy. By Samanth Subramanian

November 2019

  • A queue for a women’s toilet in Brighton

    The queue for women's toilets is a feminist issue

    Lezlie Lowe
    Simple equality is not enough in the provision of public toilets, says author Lezlie Lowe

September 2019

  • Narendra Modi

    Narendra Modi to face down critics by hailing Clean India scheme a success

    Prime minister’s announcement of an end to open defecation in India marred by claims of coercion and violence
  • Narendra Modi.

    Dismay at Gates Foundation prize for Narendra Modi

    Letters: 37 development academics and practitioners condemn the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over its intention to give the Goalkeepers Global Goals award to the Indian prime minister
  • Everton de Freitas, 18, Laisa Conceição, 17, and Eliseu Assunção, 18, in Salvador’s Pau da Lima favela

    Sewage, Zika virus – and the team in Brazil mapping disease hotspots

    Volunteers in Salvador’s favelas are collecting data on deadly infections and inequality to help campaign for better sanitation
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