Street food: take it or leave it

Street vendor, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Flickr/Adam Jones

Sean Carey’s earlier post about getting his car washed made me think that his car is probably cleaner than many people’s hands (you may recall a post in 2010 reporting on a study of fecal matter on public transportation riders’ hands in four places in the U.K).

My morning’s ramble through Google Scholar led me to an article (PDF) that most readers may have missed — it’s not written by anthropologists, and it’s published in the African Journal of Biotechnology. But it will be of interest to any world traveler, especially those who (like me) sometimes cannot resist street food. Plus, it’s open access.

The researchers collected and analyzed 70 samples of dish washing water, 85 pieces of money and 80 utensils from street food vendors in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

You can read the details yourself in the article. Here is the conclusion: The data show high levels of pathogens in all the samples. Pathogen risk increases when vendors use their bare hands to serve.

Excremental journeys

Who knew that so many commuters on trains and buses in England carry fecal bacteria on their hands? Val Curtis, medical anthropologist and public health expert, teamed up with five other researchers to assess the presence or absence of fecal bacteria on the hands of over 400 people in five UK cities. Dr. Curtis is a leading proponent of hand washing with soap in developing countries as a powerful mechanism to reduce infant and child mortality.

The findings from the UK study are gripping (so gripping in fact that you may never want to shake anyone’s hand again).

Overall, 28 percent of the 404 people sampled had bacteria of fecal origin on their hands. The authors break that figure down by region and gender. The further north you go, the higher are the percentages of men (not women) with fecal bacteria on their hands. In Newcastle, the most northerly city in the study, nearly 60 percent of the men had fecal bacteria on their hands compared to 5-15 percent in London and Cardiff. The percentage for women in all five cities had a more narrow range, between only 20-30 percent.

Beside region and gender, mode of transportation also revealed differences. Men on buses are more likely to have fecal bacteria on their hands than men who ride trains. And professionals are more likely to have fecal bacteria on their hands than others.

These findings and some complicating factors cry out for further research. First, no difference appeared between people who reported having washed or not washed their hands that morning. Second, the bacteria that were isolated are found in other contexts such as working with food or animals. Third, the sample sizes, especially of men in London (only six) are small, and London is the only truly “southern” city in the study. Fourth, the study assessed only the absence or presence of fecal bacteria and not degrees of difference in the latter.

Blogger’s note: I eagerly await findings from larger follow-up studies that take into account age and ethnicity, and that sample people in more cities. Then on to Scotland and Ireland…and maybe even to the Washington DC metro system that I use to get to work.

SOURCE: G. Judah, P. Donachie, E. Cobb, W. Schmidt, M. Holland, and V. Curtis, Dirty Hands: Bacteria of Faecal Origin on Commuters’ Hands. Epidemiological Infections, 2009.

Image: “Brazil fans on London undergound,” from flickr user markhillary , licensed with Creative Commons.

Mountains of a different kind

Tracy Kidder‘s widely read documentary book about Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti is called Mountains beyond Mountains. The title comes from a Haitian proverb which is translated into English as: “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” In other words, every challenge is followed by another.

Have you by any chance read Rose George‘s book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters? If not, I highly recommend it. It will take you where no book (that I know of) has gone before. It’s about human excrement.

In following the excrement, George will guide you through the sewers of London to open defecation in rural India to the biogas revolution in villages of China: all places and situations that are quite “normal.”

Perhaps, in an updated edition, she will add a chapter on the “big necessity” in crisis situations. What happens, for example, when over a million people are displaced from their residences and are forced to survive in “tent camps?”

One things that happens is mountains beyond mountains of excrement. An article in the New York Times points to the sanitation situation and its implications for disease. Not to mention everyday misery and degradation.

The article, however, provides a ray of hope. Viva Rio, a Brazilian nongovernmental group, has launched an operation in one slum area of Port-au-Prince that turns human excrement into biogas that can be used for cooking and electricity.

This project should be replicated throughout the camps, throughout the island: turn the mountains beyond mountains of excrement into something people can use. Thank you, Viva Rio.

Image: Creative commons licensed Flickr content by BBC World Service. Feb. 9, 2010. From Haiti. “There aren’t many latrines, so this is pretty much the only way to dispose of all types of waste – dig a big hole and stick it in the ground.”