Death, once referred to in euphemisms, if at all, has been reborn as prime-time television drama. Sex and money are now topics for documentaries, even after-dinner conversation. The last taboo, surely, is shit. The byproducts of digestion are so hard to mention-adolescent jokes aside-that symptoms of bowel cancer are often ignored until it is too late.rnBut as Rose George explains in this fascinating and eloquent book, there is a great deal that needs to be said about excretion that is not remotely funny. Two-fifths of the world's population has nowhere to defecate except open ground. That is 2.6 billion people whose drinking water contains their and their neighbour's faeces; whose food is contaminated by the flies that lay their eggs in human waste; who live in filth and very often die because of it. And yet this particular curse of poverty is all too often overlooked. Politicians and celebrities are enamoured of "clean water"-but less keen on posing next to the latrines that must be built to keep water that way.
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