When Peru had a cholera outbreak in 1991, losses from tourism and agricultural revenue were three times greater than the total money spent on sanitation in the previous decade.
— Rose George
Rotavirus does not cause all diarrhea, but it causes a lot of it. Instead of a single vaccine dose, however, harried nurses may have to give several, as diarrhoea makes it difficult for a child to retain anything.
In Los Angeles, half of all smog from sulfur dioxide comes in from ships.
In villages across the developing world, governments have provided reasonable enough latrines that have again and again been turned into storage spaces or simply abandoned. In India alone, millions of government-funded latrines have become goat-sheds. Some had been built near kitchens, a taboo in Indian households.
The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European, on one ship.
Night is the best time to visit sewers, because the businesses dispelling the most waste are closed, and the flows are calmer.
Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?
Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement.
We are using the same water that the dinosaurs drank, and this same water has to make ice creams in Pasadena and the morning frost in Paris.
Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.
Seafaring can be lucrative - the elite, such as gas-tanker captains, can earn $100,000 for six months' work - but the isolation is a heavy price to pay.
I find Suez astonishing for the first hour. It is a ditch in a desert, but a stunning one. The sensation of being hemmed in by huge ships, moving at a stately pace through a man-made waterway, is extraordinary.
'MaerskKendal' is a rarity with its British flag, the 'LONDON' home port painted on its bow, its two British chief officers, and its portrait of the queen in the mess room, apparently common courtesy on British ships, but a little alarming to me.
Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement. Biogas, as this energy is known, can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood to vegetables to human excreta.
Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields.
It's difficult on a ship to get away from your job because that accommodation house, which is where seafarers live, is their workplace, it's where they live, it's where they relax, it's everything, and it's just hard to get away. And seafarers often refer to their job as being in prison with a salary.
In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.
Half of the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering from what are generally known as water-related diseases.
As for restaurants and fast-food places who tip tons of oil down their drains, they are routinely encouraged to use fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to cart away fat (although now that fat is being turned into energy, it can make money).
Sending a container from Shanghai to Le Havre emits fewer greenhouse gases than the truck that takes the container on to Lyon.
Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That's more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.
Trade carried by sea has grown fourfold since 1970 and is still growing. In 2011, the 360 commercial ports of the United States took in international goods worth $1.73 trillion, or eighty times the value of all U.S. trade in 1960.
In some of the great cities of Europe - Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels - tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe.
The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety.
We are wasting our water mostly by putting waste into it. One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic meters of water. Discharging wastewater into oceans turns freshwater into the less useful salty stuff, and desalination is expensive.
The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea.
All that is known for sure is that endometriosis is endemic and that it cannot be cured. Management is the best hope. This makes for treatments that are, if I am being polite, based on trial and error. If I am feeling less generous, they are shots in the dark.
Seafarers are used to being exploited. At sea, the captain moans at chandlers who supply ships with green bananas that will never ripen; at fruit that goes moldy obscenely fast; at sub-standard meat.
Ships are obliged to take on harbor or river pilots - who provide specialized local navigation - when they approach a port, but in the canal, a Suez crew is also obligatory. The crew members are there in case the ship needs to be moored during the canal transit, but this rarely happens.
Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety laws.
In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward.
The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk.
We see the sea as this place of leisure and this place, you know, a blue patch on the map to fly over because we all go by plane these days, mostly. And we don't really see it as a place of industry anymore.
I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company, A. P. Moller-Maersk, is Denmark's largest company, its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark's GDP; its ships use more oil than the entire nation.
Diarrhoea is the reason you can have a malnourished child in a well-fed family.
My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is - brain damage - is too expensive.
Before containers, transport costs ate up 25 percent of the value of whatever was being shipped.
Perhaps we believe that everything travels by air, or magically and instantaneously like information (which is actually anchored by cables on the seabed), not by hefty ships that travel more slowly than senior citizens drive.
Everything in a modern container port is enormous, overwhelming, crushing.
Sewage works that serve big cities run into trouble when the cities grow up around them.
There is a scene in Richard Attenborough's biopic where Gandhi argues with his wife because she refuses to clean their latrine. She says it is the work of untouchables; he tells her there is no such thing. Gandhi's tactics of encouraging brotherly love across caste boundaries and urging Indians to clean their own latrines had failed miserably.
In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet's projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water.
Research into endometriosis is as scanty as funding.
I feel special. Most women will have only one menopause, and they will hate it. I will have two, and when the second one comes, I will know what is coming. I am having my extra menopause as a cure. I have endometriosis.
The days of languorous shore leave are long gone. Overnight stays are unheard of and sailor towns a distant memory. In better ports, seafarers head for a seamen's mission.
Usually, there is no equivalent of air traffic control at sea. Some busy areas operate 'traffic separation schemes,' but mostly, ships are treated like cars on roads where there are rules and codes of behavior, and successful, accident-free outcomes depend on everyone respecting them. As on roads, this doesn't always work.
Felixstowe, the United Kingdom's largest port, stops work only for Christmas Day and for crane-toppling Force 9 gales.
China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.
I think about what's going down my sink. So I won't pour oil down my sink. I won't - if I'm cleaning a pan, I'll wipe it and bin because I've seen - I've been down sewers.
There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route.
