Val Curtis
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Val Curtis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is one of the most effective handwashing campaigns ever.
So globally, some of the biggest killers are infectious diseases.
We've been working in programs all over the world trying to get people to wash their hands.
We use disgust to promote hand hygiene in Ghana. We did it not by talking about germs, not by talking about disease, but by making a very attractive little video where a rather well-dressed but typical Ghanaian woman came out of the toilet and you notice that she doesn't wash her hands. And then she prepares food for her kids. And you see her kneading this pounded yam.
And you see stains of something indeterminate on the pounded yam. And then you see her feeding a piece of it to her child. And there's this real moment as moms watch this ad. They realize basically that the feces that she was dealing with in the toilet have actually got into the mouths of the kids. So it's a really powerful disgust message.
This is one of the most effective handwashing campaigns ever. The rates of handwashing more than doubled, and they were still high several years after the campaign.
You already do eat insects. You're allowed to have five insect legs in a Hershey bar. I've heard that. Yeah, look it up.
So insects are one of the types of things that we tend to find disgusting in as much as how closely they're connected with disease.
In Uganda, we used to eat the flying ants that flew out once a year and we'd catch them and fry them. They don't really have much disease connection. And once you fried them and salted them and you're having them with a few beers, the wriggly, sticky, gooey nature of insects is rather forgotten. So basically, people will eat insects that don't have too strong a connection with disease.
And the more you can distance them from a connection with disease, the more likely they are to eat them.
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