UN seeks to end toilet 'taboo'

The United Nations launched a campaign on Friday to lift a deadly taboo on talking about toilets and to turn the world into an "open defecation-free zone."

The World Water Day initiative aims to cut the 3,000 children under five who die each day from water-borne diseases like cholera, dysentry and diarrhoea, and the 2.5 billion people without access to a toilet.

"Here is a silent disaster which needs to have attention," said UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, a pioneer in unsanitized talk about toilets.

"There is an element of taboo around toilets and open defecation," said Eliasson, who recalled a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2010.

"There was a little bit of 'hmmm hmmm' murmuring in the hall, I finished the speech with the word 'toilet.' It was not very common in the UN. The words which I will speak more and more often now is: 'open defecation.'"

The practice is "a fact of life" for the hundreds of millions of chronically poor people who have to go to toilet in the open air.

"Can you imagine the lack of dignity around this act, the risk of being raped if you are a woman or a girl going out at night, but also the health risk for personal health and the environment?" the UN official asked. Cutting by half the number of people with no access to fresh water by 2015 was one of the eight Millennium Development Goals on health and poverty set in 2000.

It is the target that is most off course. At the current pace, the water target may be reached by 2075. "We have an uphill battle, it is lagging so seriously," Eliasson, a former Swedish foreign minister, told reporters.

Kate Norgrove of the WaterAid group, told of how she was a teacher in a Nepal village where the school's single toilet was "a little broken down shack that sat directly above the school playground in full visibility of everyone."

Girls gradually dropped out as they reached the age when they would start to menstruate, she said. "So that's the taboo we want to break. It is a real problem and it is a real problem for those in that 2.5 billion category," said Eliasson.