Happy World Toilet Day!

No, that's not a joke.

November 19 is World Toilet Day — declared by the U.N. in 2001. The goal is to call attention to the 3.4 billion people who live without "safely managed sanitation" and the more than 300 million people who engage in "open defecation" — doing their business in the great outdoors.

Now it sure would be great if everyone on Earth had a toilet. But ... unless that toilet is hooked up to an effective and sanitary sewage disposal system, it would just be a porcelain throne.

"What the world needs is not toilets," says Dr. Stephen Luby , a professor of medicine at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "Low income communities need effective sewers and sanitation that separate their water and food from

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