Almost half of the captured bats defecate seeds during their brief incarceration, with defecation rates ranging from just a few seeds to as many as a hundred.
In the dense city and slums, sanitation often means open defecation, the use of bags or chamber pots emptied into rubbish heaps or canals, or the construction of crude, shallow pit latrines – everywhere and anywhere.
Our inability to see clearly when it comes to defecation directly contributes to 1.2 million children dying every year, still, from something as stupid as diarrhoea, caused by the fact that 2.6 billion people still have no toilets or even a bucket, and so faecal pathogens travel happily from soiled ground onto fingers, into rice pots, into bellies.
Read more like this: 'We need to talk about open defecation' Poo power: turning human waste into clean energy in Kenya's slums What do toilets have to do with nutrition?
We already knew that water provision alone couldn't break the cycle of faecal-oral disease transmission because open defecation, poor hygiene, and poorly built latrines are the main sources of faecal contamination in the environment and water, and the real reasons why diarrhoeal diseases persist despite advances in water provision.
"If open defecation was banned in Nairobi today, every member of the informal settlements would have to queue for two days to use the existing toilet facilities," he says.
The widespread practice of open defecation goes some way to explaining India's dire nutritional performance.If girls give birth very young, their babies are likely to be underweight, and to fail to thrive.
In short, demand for latrines is constrained.This suggests that the mere availability of government-built latrines will not end open defecation for decades yet.
That will be 150 years since the birth of Mohandas Gandhi, who said good sanitation was more important than independence.Ending open defecation would bring immense benefits.
Unicef, the UN's agency for children, estimates that nearly one-half of Indian children remain malnourished.Hundreds of thousands of them die from preventable conditions each year, especially in the north, which has most of the open defecation (see map).
Those with a government-built toilet were especially likely to choose a bush instead.In an unpublished parallel survey of Hindu-dominated villages in north India and Nepal, respondents lauded open defecation as wholesome, healthy and social.
