你应该知道的关于“便便”的五件事（一）Five things about Poo（1）​

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今天让我们来谈一谈......你应该知道的关于“便便”的五件事（上）

Claudia Hooper 
Hi, I’m Claudia Hooper – production assistant on Eavesdrop on Experts. You’re about to listen to a sneaky, bonus offering of Eavesdrop. This week, we bring you a special episode called 5 Things About Poo. Yep, Poo. So, I guess it’s less about Eavesdrop on Experts and more Eavesdrop on well, excrement. I’ll let Chris talk you through it. 

Chris Hatzis 
Welcome to Five Things About. I'm Chris Hatzis. Five Things About is for you and your inner curious cat, the part of you that just loves to know what others know about inventions and ideas. 
In each episode, we'll meet experts who'll share five insights from their field of work. You've heard the proverb curiosity killed the cat. The rest of the proverb is but satisfaction brought it back. So go on, knock yourself out and bring yourself back.

Today we explore five things about poo. Yep, you heard right, poo, human waste, faeces. It's something we don’t talk about openly. It can cause shame and embarrassment, but our toilet habits reveal a lot about our emotions, attitudes, culture and gender. It's also a serious issue. Faecal borne diseases are a major cause of death in many places around the world.

Our host today is Claire Darling, podcasting intern at the University of Melbourne. We're talking to Professor Nick Haslam from the University of Melbourne's Department of Psychological Sciences.

Nick Haslam 
Universally, excrement is the main taboo term across, pretty much, all languages. 

Chris Hatzis 
Nick is the author of Psychology in the Bathroom. It's a great read about the sociology of poo. We'll also hear from Naomi Francis, a PhD candidate at the Nossal Institute.

Naomi Francis 
We have toilet graveyards around the world.

Chris Hatzis 
Naomi's investigating the link between poor water sanitation and hygiene in Timor-Leste. As part of her research, she asks people where they defecated that morning. So luckily for us, she's well practised in having awkward conversations.

Claire Darling 
Hi Nick. Preparing for this episode sparked a very candid conversation about poo amongst my colleagues. In particular, we talked about that time around 11 AM, when our caffeinated mornings find us all migrating to the office toilets. Each of us had different feelings about how we approach pooing in a shared toilet. It's an embarrassing event for many of us. Nick, why are some people so fearful about going to the toilet in public?

Nick Haslam 
Well, I think it's a very private act, and it's something which strong emotions are attached to. For instance, people often feel disgusted about the process. You're taught from an early age that your poo is something to be gotten rid of and forgotten about and flushed away. There's a lot of shame to do with it. You're exposing your body in a way you wouldn’t do in public.

I think also, especially for women, there is more concern about being pure, clean, proper and, in the words of one study participant on a study on this topic, women are meant to be non-poopers. It's something which somehow goes against femininity, if you like. Not to say that there's lots of anxieties about going to the bathroom for both men and women. There's enormous anxiety to do with it, partly, as I said, exposure, partly the fact that there's a lot of disgust and shame attached to this very human practice everywhere.

Claire Darling 
So how is this taboo around human poo - how has that developed over time? Is it as big an issue now as it was, say, 100, 200 years ago?

Nick Haslam 
I think it's always been an issue, and it's an issue for a very good reason. I mean a huge number of children die each year because of faecally transmitted infections. There are very good reasons to get rid of your excrement. It is a primal contaminating substance. I think a lot of us get that. I mean there's a wonderful survey done of the British public a while ago, which were - they were asked to say which are the most important inventions of all time, and number nine was the flush toilet, right above the combustion engine. People get it. People get how it is important to be rid of this stuff. 

Now, that’s not to say it's an instinct. So people often imagine that there must be some sort of instinctive aversion to excrement, but you only have to look at very small children to realise there's no instinct. They’ll smear things. They do all sorts of horrible things.

My favourite study of this was done with two year olds by the American psychologist Paul Rosen. What he did was he constructed a fake poo out of peanut butter and smelly blue cheese, put it on crackers and offered it to two year olds, and almost all of them took it and ate it, even when told what it was, which, of course, it wasn’t.

So there's no instinct of aversion. You have to learn it. But once you've learned it, I think, even as an adult, there's this taboo attached to it; not necessarily one which inspires horror, but that anxiety, and the fact that we make humour of this is partly a way of acknowledging that there's some sort of taboo charge attached to it.

Claire Darling 
Diarrhoea caused by dirty water and bad sanitation is the second biggest killer of children worldwide. PhD candidate, Naomi Francis, has been working with WaterAid to improve access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene in Timor-Leste.

Naomi Francis 
The biggest problem we're worried about with poo and containing it is diarrhoea. Lots of diarrhoea is caused by stuff found in poo. Our poo has lots of pathogens in it, and they come in several formats. One is viruses, and they're a small infectious agent that replicates inside the living cells of other organisms. So that’s one.

Bacteria are another. They're just single celled micro-organisms. Protozoa, another one, another kind of single cell micro-organism. And then there's helminths, which are parasitic worms. Those are the four main players involved in causing disease in our poo.

Claire Darling 
WaterAid states that three in 10 people in Timor-Leste lack safe water, and twice as many have nowhere to go to the toilet but out in the open. Can you tell us more about the situation there?

Naomi Francis 
The biggest issue is what we call open defecation, which is a fancy word for shitting in the bush basically. That could be in rivers, usually in a private spot, in the forest. Sometimes it's in the ocean. It doesn’t just refer to going and finding a random spot. Open defecation includes unsafe forms of sanitation, so someone may have built a specific structure or place for going to the toilet, but if it's not safely containing faeces, then it's considered open defecation.

In these remote communities people are usually accessing water from what we would call unsafe sources, so open sources like springs or rivers or creeks. Those are fine as long as they're protected and you can be sure that they're not being contaminated by what's going on upstream, and that might be open defecation or animals or industry. So a lot of these communities aren’t accessing safe water. 

In terms of their sanitation practices most of the community will be defecating in the open, and in terms of hygiene, because of a lack of convenient water sources, so they're having to carry their water. They're not washing their hands as frequently as they should. There's less than safe levels of menstrual hygiene management. The main things that are going on is that people don’t have access to safe water or a safe way to deal with their faeces.

Claire Darling 
So how do community led programs address these issues?

Naomi Francis 
This technique that WaterAid are using is - it's really tapping into - or it's trying to, I guess, use people's feelings of disgust and shame around faeces to trigger them into changing their behaviour. 

The way it's done in the villages that I saw in Timor-Leste were there's a community meeting that’s held, and the community are asked to draw - or make a community map out of coloured sand on the ground. On that map, various people are asked to mark out where they defecated that day. It's meant to be a little bit embarrassing, but it's meant to be funny, and usually it is. In all the contexts that I saw people were a bit uncomfortable, but there was lots of laughing and fooling around with it as well.

Then a second part of the activity is to actually go for a walk out in to the community to find places where people have defecated. The facilitator will take a stick with them. They’ll find a piece of poo, put the stick in it, bring it back to the group, they’ll get one of their hairs and put it on the faeces on the stick and then put that in a glass of water. This is all to symbolise that a hair is as big as the legs of a fly, and it's just to show the faecal oral pathway via that fly route. 

Then they’ll offer the glass of water around to people in the group and, obviously, no-one will drink it. But they're really trying to bring home to people what the faecal oral pathway is and what's going on when they shit in the bush and don’t cover it up.

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