82 1GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times
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mother figure to designers such as the
young Ralph Lauren and a shy Donna
Karan, championing their creativity
through the pages of Mademoiselle, the
Condé Nast magazine for women,
known for short as “Millie”.
If prone to favour the colour pink,
Mademoiselle also offered its 18 to 35-
year-old readers fuel for the mind. Arti-
cles on “Romantic Fashions for Spring”
would run alongside features exploring
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas or
the writing of William Faulkner.Curtis worked
on hygiene
campaigns
Valerie Curtis believed that it was poss-
ible to harness people’s feelings of dis-
gust to make them behave more hy-
gienically, even if that meant breaking
taboos. “You’ve got to know your
enemy and look your enemy in the
face,” she said. “Some people say it’s not
acceptable for academics to go around
talking about shit, but it’s not accept-
able for 600,000 children to be dying
unnecessarily because we don’t talk
about shit.”
As a self-styled “disgustologist” she
advised governments, NGOs and the
United Nations on hygiene and sanita-
tion and spent her career working out
how to save lives by persuading people
to wash their hands.
Her research showed her that people
the world over are disgusted by similar
things: faeces, bodily fluids, insects, rot-
ten food, and so on — all things that can
make us ill. From this she concluded
that the evolutionary function of dis-
gust was to keep us away from patho-
gens and parasites. People who felt
more compelled to stay away from
these things would be more likely to
survive, reproduce and pass on their
feelings of revulsion to their offspring.
To illustrate her point she imagined
the members of a Stone Age village
inviting those from a neighbouring vil-
lage for a delicious dinner — of faeces
— only for their invitation to be turned
down in disgust. “Which of the two
groups of villagers do you think would
survive to reproduce better?” she asked.
“Obviously it’s the people who stay
away from the parasites and the patho-
gens that are present in human poo.”
Unlike our ancestors, we know that
pathogens can also lurk in places that
do not look disgusting, such as on lava-
tory doorknobs or the handrails of Un-
derground trains. Yet we do not always
wash our hands after touching them. It
is not that we do not know that we
should, it is that we do not feel viscerally
motivated to do so. We do not feel the
same revulsion towards invisible filth
that our ancestors learnt to feel towards
visible filth. Curtis spent much of her
time figuring out how best to correct
that attitude.
Together with her partner, Robert
Aunger, whom she met when hiring
him to join her team at the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medi-
cine (LSHTM), she developed her own
theory of behavioural change. Called
Behaviour Centred Design, it is the idea
that it is not enough merely to tell
people why they should act in a
particular way; instead, one
must change something in
their environment to re-
mind them to act in that
way. “For example,” she
and Aunger wrote, “in a
food hygiene interven-
tion in Nepal, groups
of neighbours came
together for ‘kitchen
makeovers’ in
which the kit-
chen space was
repainted and
decorated as a
‘safe food’ zone, food preparation gad-
gets were distributed and new behav-
ioural ‘scripts’ were suggested to them,
all of which succeeded in creating new,
safer food preparation routines among
mothers in the intervention villages.”
Curtis found ways to visualise invis-
ible filth that were shocking and all the
more effective for it. As part of a Ghana-
ian hygiene campaign she and her col-
leagues helped to make an advert
which showed a young mother leaving
a lavatory with a purple smear on her
hand to represent faeces, then going to
make bread for her child. As she knead-
ed it the purple stain spread into the
bread, and then, after it was baked, into
her child’s mouth. The Ghanaian moth-
ers to whom she showed the film were
horrified. “It didn’t need words,” Curtis
said. A year after the advert appeared,
handwashing in Ghana had increased
41 per cent before eating and 13 per cent
after using the lavatory.
“Emotions are the key to changing
people’s behaviour,” she said. “It’s not
education that will do it. It’s not know-
ledge. If you want a child to stop touch-ing poo, you don’t talk to them, you just
pull a face.”
Valerie Curtis was born in Seascale,
Cumbria, in 1958, the daughter of Mar-
garet (née Snelling), a botanist and en-
vironmental scientist, and Geoffrey, a
physicist at the Atomic Energy Author-
ity. She was educated at the Queen’s
School, Chester. From an early age she
wanted to work to improve the lives
of others, and by 16 she had decided
that becoming an engineer was the way
to do it.
Having studied civil engineering at
the University of Leeds, she went to
work for several NGOs, including Ox-
fam, Save the Children and the Red
Cross, in Kenya, Ethiopia and war-torn
Uganda. Her task, to install water
pumps in remote villages, proved an
invaluable lesson in how ill-thought-
through aid work could be useless. The
villagers, she realised, didn’t have ac-
cess to spare parts, “so there would be
graveyards of these pumps dotted all
around the villages. The villages would
have some sort of water already, and
perhaps improving that source of
water might have been a more ef-
ficient way of making things bet-
ter for the local women. While
the programme was all about
technology, I learnt that
behaviour was much more
important.”
Her experiences in Africa
drove her to study for a
master’s degree in public
health at the LSHTM,
after which she went to
Burkina Faso to
work in diar-
rhoea preven-
tion. It was
here that she
first noticed
that “people
had been‘Emotions are the key
to changing people’s
behaviour,’ she argued
Obituaries
Professor Valerie Curtis
‘Disgustologist’ who as part of Sage advised the government on Covid-19
taught to wash hands, had understood
the issues and still didn’t wash their
hands”. It was also in Burkina Faso that
she met Moctar Sacande, an expert on
land management. They married in
2000 and had two children, Abi, who
plays cricket for Sussex, and Naima,
who is a women’s justice advocate for
the charity Appeal. Curtis and Sacande
divorced in 2009. She married Aunger
this year shortly before her death.
In 1989 Curtis became a research fel-
low at the maternal and child epi-
demiology unit at the LSHTM. The
position was her dream job, she said,
and it catapulted her into a career of aid
work and research that combined engi-
neering, public health and evolutionary
anthropology. In 1996 she became a
lecturer in hygiene promotion at
LSHTM, and two years later received
her PhD in anthropology from Wage-
ningen University in the Netherlands.
In 2001 she became a professor at
LSHTM and the director of its Envi-
ronmental Health Group.
Her life-saving efforts to improve hy-
giene worldwide included co-founding
the Global Public-Private Partnership
for Handwashing (now the Global
Handwashing Partnership) in 2001 and
helping to establish Global Handwash-
ing Day in 2008. She advised many
governments mounting sanitation
campaigns, including in Zambia,
Tanzania and Nepal. She was the
behaviour-change adviser to the larg-
est sanitation programme in the world,
started by the Indian prime minister
Narendra Modi in 2014, which led to
the construction of almost 100 million
lavatories in four years. An indefatiga-
ble campaigner, she somehow found
the time to run (unsuccessfully)
for election as a Labour councillor
in 2019, in the Tory heartland of
Haywards Heath.
As she approached 60, Curtis had
plans “to become a ferocious old battle-
axe and then to enjoy my golden years”.
Yet last year those hopes were snatched
away by a diagnosis of cancer. Despite
her diagnosis, she turned her attention
to stopping the spread of the coronavi-
rus, a public health crisis to which her
expertise might have been tailored. She
advised the government both as part of
the behavioural science group of the
Scientific Advisory Group for Emer-
gencies (Sage) and as part of the inde-
pendent Sage group. She chose not to
ease her pain with medication, to keep
her mind sharp.
Curtis knew that if she hadn’t had to
wait two months for radiotherapy on
the NHS, then a further two after the
return of her cancer, her chances of
survival would have been higher. In-
stead of languishing in this knowledge,
she wrote about her situation in The
Guardian, using it to illustrate how
important it is to give ample funding to
“our committed and dedicated NHS
health professionals who have proven
during the pandemic what a heroic job
they do. Give them a plan and the
resources they need to do what they
desperately want to do — to save lives
like mine.”Valerie Curtis, “disgustologist”, was born
on September 20, 1958. She died of
cancer on October 19, 2020, aged 62Edith Raymond
Renowned magazine editor who hired Germaine
Edie Locke liked to sign off every
e-mail, and end every phone call, with
the words inscribed on her silver ban-
gle: carpe diem. The motto was apt. At
the age of 18, she had escaped Nazi-oc-
cupied Vienna where, as a Jew, she had
been obliged to scrub the floors of the
local SS headquarters. Arriving in New
York in 1939 with no English, she initial-
ly packed toothbrushes in a factory in
Brooklyn but later rose to renown as a
journalist in the world of high fashion.
For 30 years Locke was a quasi-