Whenever you come across a scenic picture painted during the Renaissance of Europe, you should realise that the conditions at the time were anything but picturesque. Despite our adaptations to modern cleanliness practices, it might be hard to imagine a world so different from what humanity had seen throughout its history.

The history of sanitation

Contemporary London reached its peak during the 17th and 18th centuries with newly found wealth, but the streets of the metropolis were littered with household waste.

“Gardyloo!” one would cry whenever a household threw solid waste out of their windows and onto the streets. There was nothing glamorous about those cities in those days; the streets were crowded with human waste, spreading diseases indiscriminately.

The beauty of those cities may have been imagined well in Renaissance paintings, but even after the Middle Ages, in 1858, the ‘Great Stink’ made the UK monarch desperate to rid the city of its literal problem.

In those times, the monarchy and some members of the nobility enjoyed the flushed toilet system, but there was no adequate way to dispose of waste. Landlords would dig wells further away from their residences to manage waste, while city dwellers had no choice but to use the streets as their waste disposal system.

After the horrors of the Great Stink, Sir Joseph William Bazalgette was tasked with building a system to manage waste, and thus the modern sewer system was born.

The life-saving role of sanitation

It has been proven that contaminated water is a carrier of various diseases such as diarrhoea and cholera, killing countless lives, especially children. These water-borne diseases find a suitable ground for reproduction whenever wastewater comes into contact with drinkable sources.

According to the IRC report by Quazi & Pramanik, in rural Bangladesh, sanitary latrine coverage was about 1% in 1981. During the same period, an epidemiological study found that Dhaka experienced large El Tor cholera waves in 1974–1975; surveillance studies documented high incidence and hospitalisations, and noted that areas with better sanitation were relatively spared.

Through various international efforts and programmes targeting clean sanitation, Bangladesh overcame this epidemic of cholera and diarrhoea. According to ICDDR,B’s 2020 Annual Report, diarrhoeal disease mortality among under‑5s declined from 15.1 to 6.0 deaths per 1,000 live births over the multi-decade period from 1980 to 2015.

World Toilet Day

World Toilet Day (WTD) was first informally observed in 2001 by the World Toilet Organization (WTO), a global non-profit founded by Jack Sim, a sanitation activist from Singapore. On 24 July 2013, the United Nations General Assembly officially designated 19 November as World Toilet Day through a UN resolution (A/RES/67/291). The UN aimed to highlight the global sanitation crisis: more than 4.2 billion people lacked safely managed sanitation services, and 2 billion practiced open defecation at the time.

The problem still persists. According to a WHO report, improving global access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) could have prevented 1.4 million deaths per year (in 2019) from unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

On its sanitation fact sheet, WHO states that unsafe sanitation accounts for 564,000 deaths annually (part of the 1.4 million) as of 2024 data.

Much awareness is required to properly mitigate such harmful effects, and as seen before, targeted campaigns can be effective. In the case of Bangladesh, this has been proven. Therefore, on World Toilet Day, let us pay significant attention to the need for cleanliness and sanitation, and hope that the necessity for organising such “embarrassing” days can one day be gone.