Beyond Bazalgette: 150 years of sanitation

Brewer, Tim; Pringle, Yolana

doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(15)61231-4

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Thus, in mid-19th century London, UK, putrid contamination of the River Thames and recurrent epidemics of cholera led to regulation of public drinking water sources 338 and to the construction of large conduits for the removal of human waste and industrial pollution that now form the Thames Embankment. 339 Episodes of severe air pollution with substantial loss of life, such as the Great Fog of London in 1952, 340 and the Donora, Pennsylvania episode in the USA led to the passage of clean air legislation. Occupational and mining disasters catalysed the development of worker health and safety legislation.…”

Section: Section 4: Effective Interventions Against Pollution: Priorimentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health

Landrigan

Fuller

Acosta³

et al. 2018

The Lancet

3,332

1,960

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Section: Section 4: Effective Interventions Against Pollution: Priorimentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health

Landrigan

Fuller

Acosta³

et al. 2018

The Lancet

3,332

1,960

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…A famous example is the construction of the London sewers, in response to the threat of cholera. The works were mandated by an act of parliament, as were many later improvements in the treatment of sewage ( Brewer and Pringle, 2015 ). The inflexibilities of Soviet central planning need not and should not be replicated by planners.…”

Section: Ethical Concernsmentioning

confidence: 99%

After the Pandemic: New Responsibilities

Levy

Savulescu

2021

Public Health Ethics

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Seasonal influenza kills many hundreds of thousands of people every year. We argue that the current pandemic has lessons we should learn concerning how we should respond to it. Our response to the COVID-19 not only provides us with tools for confronting influenza; it also changes our sense of what is possible. The recognition of how dramatic policy responses to COVID-19 were and how widespread their general acceptance has been allowed us to imagine new and more sweeping responses to influenza. In fact, we not only can grasp how we can reduce its toll; this new knowledge entails new responsibilities to do so. We outline a range of potential interventions to alter social norms and to change structures to reduce influenza transmission, and consider ethical objections to our proposals.

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“…Improvements in urban sanitation in the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and North America resulted in significant inhibition of the spread of infectious disease. Subsequently, centralized waterborne sanitation was ranked as one of the top medical and engineering achievements of the 20th century. , However, urban development and sewers have not always progressed hand in hand. In Harappa (modern day Pakistan), underground sewers for conveying human excreta were built as early as 3000 BC, with every house having a flush toilet .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 Since then, sanitation services have fluctuated with changes in civilizations, from the Cloaca Maxima in ancient Rome to no central sewer in London until the end of the 19th century. 2 Diverse improvements have been made with flush toilets, piped sewers, and wastewater treatment, but this impetus has not been sufficient to solve the sanitation challenge on a worldwide basis. Currently, only 64% of urban residents globally are served by sewers, 4 and it is not known how much wastewater actually receives effective treatment.…”

Section: ■ Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Harappa (modern day Pakistan), underground sewers for conveying human excreta were built as early as 3000 BC, with every house having a flush toilet . Since then, sanitation services have fluctuated with changes in civilizations, from the Cloaca Maxima in ancient Rome to no central sewer in London until the end of the 19th century . Diverse improvements have been made with flush toilets, piped sewers, and wastewater treatment, but this impetus has not been sufficient to solve the sanitation challenge on a worldwide basis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban Sanitation: New Terminology for Globally Relevant Solutions?

Strande,

Evans,

von Sperling

et al. 2023

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Progress toward Sustainable Development Goals for global access to safe sanitation is lagging significantly. In this Feature, we propose that misleading terminology leads to errors of categorization and hinders progress toward sanitation service provision in urban areas. Binary classifications such as “offsite/onsite” and “sewered/nonsewered” do not capture the need for “transport to treatment” or the complexity of urban sanitation and should be discarded. “Fecal sludge management” is used only in the development context of low- or middle-income countries, implying separate solutions for “poor” or “southern” contexts, which is unhelpful. Terminology alone does not solve problems, but rather than using outdated or “special” terminology, we argue that a robust terminology that is globally relevant across low-, middle-, and upper-income contexts is required to overcome increasingly unhelpful assumptions and stereotypes. The use of accurate, technically robust vocabulary and definitions can improve decisions about management and selection of treatment, promote a circular economy, provide a basis for evidence-based science and technology research, and lead to critical shifts and transformations to set policy goals around truly safely managed sanitation. In this Feature, the three current modes of sanitation are defined, examples of misconceptions based on existing terminology are presented, and a new terminology for collection and conveyance is proposed: (I) fully road transported, (II) source-separated mixed transport, (III) mixed transport, and (IV) fully pipe transported.

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Beyond Bazalgette: 150 years of sanitation

Cited by 7 publications

References 1 publication

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health

After the Pandemic: New Responsibilities

Urban Sanitation: New Terminology for Globally Relevant Solutions?

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