World Toilet Day is held every year on 19 November all over the world. It was first established by the World Toilet Organization in 2001, and the UN General Assembly declared "World Toilet Day" as an official UN day in 2013. This year, World Toilet Day is observed under the slogan of "Making the invisible visible" with the theme of sanitation and groundwater.
Sustainable Development Goal #6 calls for universal access to adequate and equitable sanitation and the end of open defecation by 2030. Today, 3.6 billion people are still living with poor quality toilets that ruin their health and pollute their environment. Inadequate sanitation systems spread human waste into rivers, lakes and soil, contaminating the water resources under our feet. We are seriously off track to ensure safe toilets for all by 2030. That is the promise of Sustainable Development Goal 6.2. With only 8 years left, the world needs to work 4 times faster to meet this target.
On the occasion of the coming World Toilet Day, the Environmental Health Department of the National Center for Public Health in Mongolia organized “Making the Invisible Visible” environmental health seminar on 15 November 2022. The online and in-class hybrid seminar was attended by 72 participants from the Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization, the National Center for Public Health, the National Center for Communicable Diseases, the National University of Medical Sciences, the Water Supply and Sewerage Authority the National Institute for Educational Research, the Institute of Geography and Geo-ecology, ACF NGO, UNHABITAT, Health Departments of provinces and UB city and district health centers.
At the end of the seminar, the participants drafted an action plan to improve sanitation and reduce the invisible pollution, and identified the further the interventions and actions.