"Hygiene and sanitation issues have often been ignored," Jarso Shiferaw, Ethiopia's minister for water resources, said at the Stockholm water week, which brings together experts from 100 countries.

Unlike access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene issues are shrouded in embarrassment, making them "very much taboo subjects", according to Roberto Lenton, chairman of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), a Geneva-based organization promoting cooperation in water supply and sanitation.

"Sanitation is taken as a domestic issue. People ask advice about their water supply, but not about the toilet in their house," said Uganda's minister for water, Maria Mutagamba.

"While water is life, sanitation is dignity," Lenton added.

But a lack of sanitation can also mean premature death, according to the WSSCC, which calls it the world's biggest cause of infection.

"Excrement kills. It kills by the million," it said.

Diarrhoeal disease alone kills 6,000 children per day, and 2.5 billion people live "without a clean, private place to defecate and urinate", according to WSSCC figures.

"Instead they use fields, streams, rivers, railway lines, canal banks, roadsides, plastic bages, waster-paper or squalid, foul-smelling, disease-breeding buckets and insanitary latrines," it said.

And yet, the sanitation issue often "falls between the cracks" of the efforts of various government and international efforts, Lenton said.

Mamphono Khaketla, Lesotho's minister of natural resources, said water issues were handled by ministries for health, environment, agriculture and others who do not always work together.

"We have to improve coordination within governments, and also streamline proliferation of international agencies. I wish there was one water body I could turn to," she said.

Education was another factor, with Mutagamba bemoaning the lack of hygiene education at schools in favour of "more intellectual achievements", and reluctance of the rural population to accept that clean water is worth paying money for.

"People take water for granted. And many will spend money on a grand wedding, but not to contribute to water sanitation," she said.

But at the end of the day, poverty is the real reason why sanitation is not at the top of the agenda.

"If I have 20 litres of clean water, will I use it to cook, to wash or to go to the toilet?" asked Khaketla.

"The choice is obvious: to cook. While we are at that stage, sanitation will be on the backburner," she said.

The Stockholm conference gathers some 1,200 experts from 100 countries until Friday.

Questions of infrastructure, coping with climate issues, water in agriculture, land degradation and water pollution are on the programme.

Seminars range from one about cities and water use - "The political economy of defecation" - to how to improve the marketing of better toilets, and whether widespread installation of dams has been beneficial or harmful.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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