print“Labour of lavs”* is a delightfully titled article in The Economist (an excellent source of global news for those of us who’re sick of the cesspool that is the American media, Left and Right).
“… In the past few decades China has done a fairly good job of supplying basic sanitation. Only 2% of Chinese still do their business in the bushes, compared with 40% in India; three-quarters have access to toilets which the World Health Organisation deems acceptable, up from less than two-thirds in 2000. But about 70m still use shared facilities, and 260m continue to rely on bucket loos, open pits and other grungy facilities. Some are literally lethal: last month police traced a huge blast in the port city of Ningbo, which killed two people, back to an exploding septic tank. …”
If toilet habits are so abysmal in China, just imagine what these are like in India.
MORE in “Labour of lavs.“
* A combination of “lavatory” and the phrase a labor of love. The image is of a typical Chinese toilet.