How Do You Solve a Problem Like Diarrhea? Poop Jokes May Save Millions of Kids a Year

There are two ways to try to draw attention to the oft-ignored issue of diarrhea in the Third World. You can point out that it’s literally a dead serious thing, an ailment that kills more than a million children under age 5 every year. Or you can use comedy in the service of tragedy─i.e., you can make jokes about poop.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF are adopting the former strategy. On Wednesday, they released a long joint report criticizing the global health community for neglecting diarrheal disease and laying out a seven-point plan for fighting it.

But the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine─not normally a goofy place─is going the funny route instead. On Thursday evening, in the name of public awareness, it’s co-hosting a red-carpet awards ceremony and a “hilarious, unmissable evening of comedy and short animated films about hygiene and,” yes, “poo.” 

There’s not much about the Golden Poo Awards that can be said with a straight face. The film-festival entries include such documentaries as “Dancing in the Loo,” “Poo in Passing,” and, for the literal-minded, “A Film About Poo.” The promo montage on the awards Web site ends with the assurance that the film festival is “not as crap as it sounds.” Even the trophies are grody, says Valerie Curtis, director of the LSHTM’s Hygiene Centre and one of the brains behind the campaign: “I hope [the winners] are comfortable with being presented with a golden turd.”

It’s all very funny, but isn’t it a bit weird to snicker about a disease with an annual death toll of a million children─kids who often die without shedding any tears because their bodies are so dehydrated?

Well, that’s kind of the point. The public-health campaign has already offended some people, particularly in developing countries with high death rates and conservative political climates─and to some degree “the controversy helps us,” says Curtis. Without a little edge, campaigns to raise awareness of diarrheal disease just get ignored in the West. So maybe it’s OK to offend a few people if that’s the only way to get some much-needed attention for your cause. Really, which is more upsetting, the campaign or the million deaths it’s trying to prevent?  

The reason such an edgy campaign is needed in the first place is complex. But it boils down to two basic points. One, diarrheal disease isn’t often fatal in developed countries, where decent sanitation, antibiotics, and Pedialyte keep it managable─so Westerners don’t realize it’s such a killer in the developing world. Two, diarrhea is gross, and people don’t like talking about it, at least not in a serious way. “Think of what it took to talk about safe-sex practices with AIDS,” says James Hickman, vice president for external affairs at the Institute for OneWorld Health, which is developing treatments for diarrheal disease. “You might not think that talking about diarrhea and poop would be even more uncomfortable for people─but that may well be what we’re up against.”

The LSHTM found its way around that problem while partnering with huge global firms such as Unilever to promote Global Handwashing Day (that’s today, by the way). The companies taught the school a key tenet of successful marketing, says Curtis: “If you want messages to go viral, you have to have something that will make people smile or laugh.”

So far, the strategy seems to be working. The Poo Awards were sold out almost as soon as tickets went on sale, and they generated quite a bit of press interest in the U.K., Curtis says. If poop jokes are what it takes to get diarrheal disease covered in the media, well, whatever works. They got you reading this article, didn’t they?