Using human shit as fertilizer seems to violate the most basic sanitary rules. It’s well known that Cholera epidemics are linked to contaminated water. Hatti had Cholera break out after the earthquake a couple years ago. Giardia is another big pathogen that is found in feces.
Any farmer knows the placement of his outhouse or septic tank is critical for his family’s health. All sorts of illnesses come from feces contaminated water. You don’t shit where you want to plant a vegetable garden either.
So why aren’t the people in Asia all dead? They crap in their rice fields every morning. The fields are covered in water. So both their food and their water supply is contaminated. Yet these people are thriving. But any Viet Nam or Korea vet will tell you that they got sick if they ate the local food.
Bonus question: Why is cow manure ok in a garden? What other animal fertilize is safe to grow food in? Sheep? Pig? Chicken?
There’s a difference between drinking water contaminated with human feces and eating food that was fertilized by it, basically.
In the former, the enteric pathogens like cholera, salmonella, giardia, shigella, campylobacter, C. Diff, etc, go right into the person via ingesting the water, and make them sick.
In the latter, the growing grains utilize the nitrogen in the feces to build, well, rice and similar. The enteric pathogens are not assimilated into the plants. And harvesting, drying, then cooking the grains ensures further that the pathogens are dead.
Field workers who ingest the fertilizer or don’t otherwise practice good hygiene probably do have more problems with enteric pathogens. And water sources for cooking and eating are generally separated from those used for fertilization.
I assume in those situations they still understand the concept of separating drinking water sources from recent field run-off. Water from a deep well will not be contaminated unless there’s a shortcut from the fields.
I searched Cecil’s columns for “rice” and didn’t find any that covered feces fertilized fields. I’m surprised because the feces fed rice fields became known by Korean Vets over 60 years ago.
In the U.S. thier have been a few problems where contaminated water was used in a sprinkler system on leafy vegetables. I have never heard of a probelm comming from contaminated soil. Possibly root vegis would be at risk here if not properly washed.
Farmers aren’t supposed to use raw feces on crops.
They have to be broken down by composting or spread out on a fallow field to allow time/microbes/heat generated to make a fertilizer that won’t “burn” plants and make the nutrients the plant can use available.
I don’t believe many pathogens would survive the temperature spike associated with well composted materials.
I’m in China, and most of my Chinese friends refuse to eat fresh, uncooked vegetables.
Why ? Because it is well known that the vegetables in China are fertilized with human poo.
Very difficult to find vegetables in China that are not cooked in oil.
My bus through rural Guangxi once stopped at a road house for lunch. The bathroom consisted of a trough against a wall, with the wall not quite going down into the bottom of the trough. Poopers simply squatted with their backs against the wall. It then dawned on me what the strange sound was on the other side of the wall. It was hogs, profiting from nutritional access to the shit. Whereupon, I went back into the dining room and enjoyed a dish containing the best Canadian Bacon I’ve ever eaten.
The Chinese people produce about 100-million tons of shit a year. They don’t waste anything that can be used.
I can’t remember where, but I saw a program in which it was theorized that ancient people who were overly modest (cleaner?) about their bathroom habits would crap in a few secluded shady spots, basically consolidating the waste into petri dishes of disease. While more open cultures (unclean?) would crap everywhere, and the drying effect and UV from the sun would kill off anything bad.
Speaking from experience, I can say that drinking water from a stream a long way from a shit fertilized field will still make you very, very sick.
Also, flopping down into a shit fertilized rice paddy will inevitably splash some mud into the general vicinity of your mouth or hands, which will inevitably get into your mouth and digestive tract.
The result of either route of ingestion is bound to ruin you weekend. And the rest of the month too.
I used to work at the Air Force Academy. At the time, the medians on the boulevard leading up to the campus was watered by --shall we say-- the effluvia of said campus.
Since the watering schedule was at the same time as the employee rush hour in the morning, we had to drive through the spray. Ruined many a car’s finish.
Chinese food is generally cooked over extremely high heat, which kills basically anything. Raw veggies are rarely consumed, and when they are, they are always peeled. Fruit is always washed with soap (most Chinese dish soap does double duty as produce wash) and peeled. Even grapes get peeled.