Water Engineering and Development Centre

30 Nov 2017

Rethinking the effectiveness of defecation postures and practices

It’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it!

This paper reports on a piece of research to investigate the effectiveness of defecation postures and anal cleansing method. The research compared how long each bowel movement took on a pedestal toilet with and without a footstool. Volunteers were asked to compare the two positions for speed as well as stress/strain on the body. The effectiveness of the method of anal cleansing was also rated by a subset of the volunteers. Although the study was conducted using volunteers in the UK, the findings have international relevance for sanitation marketing and hygiene promotion programmes.

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