WASH Research News

“ACCORDING to results from the Hygiene Promotion and Illness Reduction study, children aged five years or under experienced significantly fewer respiratory, gastrointestinal, and skin diseases when their families participated in intensive hygiene education plus the use of hygiene products.

The results of the three year study, which was conducted in impoverished urban communities in South Africa and presented during the 13th International Congress on Infectious Diseases (ICID) held in Kuala Lumpur recently, also show that hygiene education alone offers meaningful improvements in illness reduction compared to no education at the start of the study.

However when effective hygiene products (antibacterial soap, surface cleanser/disinfectant, and skin antiseptic) were used in addition to education, an even greater reduction in the risk of illness was noted”.

[...]

Prof. Eugene Cole

“The study was developed and conducted under the guidance of the Health and Hygiene Promotion Partnership (HPP), a community-based project founded in 2005 by cooperation between Reckitt Benckiser Inc and Brigham Young University [lead investigator Dr Eugene Cole], with members of the participating housing communities, under the approval of the Cape Town City Health Department”.

References:

1. Cole E, Hawkley M, Rubino J, McCue K, Crookston B, and Dixon J. Comprehensive family hygiene promotion in peri-urban Cape Town: Gastrointestinal and skin disease reduction in children under five. 13th ICID; Read abstract no 68.012.

2. Cole E, Crookston B, Rubino J, McCue K, Hawkley M, and Dixon J. Comprehensive family hygiene promotion in peri-urban Cape Town: Reduction of respiratory illness in children under five. 13th ICID; Read abstract no 68.030

Read more: The Star Online (Malaysia), 06 July 2008

Nsiah-Kumi, P.A. (2008). Communicating effectively with vulnerable populations during water contamination events. Journal of water and health ; vol. 6, no. S1 ; p. s63-s75. doi:10.2166/wh.2008.041

Abstract

Water contamination events are a public health concern worldwide with significant potential to impact the global community. When communicating with the public during these crisis situations, it is vital to consider the multiple audiences who receive the messages. Before developing or delivering messages to a particular community, it is essential to be familiar with the community’s characteristics, needs, concerns, and who is considered credible to that community.

Vulnerable populations are those with difficulties in comprehension or accessibility that may limit their full understanding of risks and may mitigate the effectiveness of public health strategies. Vulnerable populations include, but are not limited to, the urban/rural poor, those who are mentally ill, intellectually disabled, medically vulnerable, at the extremes of age (children and the elderly), racial/ethnic minorities, and those with low literacy or limited English proficiency.

A water contamination event poses a unique opportunity to work with diverse populations to effectively convey important health messages. Each population needs to receive appropriate public health messages. Becoming familiar with vulnerable populations and their needs prior to a water contamination event will help in identifying barriers and developing and refining effective messages in such a crisis. In water contamination crises, our publics’ health depends on effective, targeted crisis communication.

From October - December 2008, UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) will be scoping:

• research on how to achieve better sanitation coverage, and
• a potential research-into-use programme in water and sanitation

Subject to approval, possible invitations for research will be sent between April 2009 and March 2010.

The above is mentioned in DFID’s Research strategy 2008-2010 implementation timetable. DFID’s WASH-related research priorities were published earlier in this blog [see the full research strategy document here]

The implementation timetable gives external stakeholders information about the likely content and timing of future research competitions and calls for proposals.

In addition, the timetable shows when DFID is likely to develop (i.e. scope) detailed research specifications. This activity has been included because it may generate requirements for external consultancy support, which DFID would advertise (the main determinant being the amount of funding involved). Research which is scoped in a particular area will not necessarily result in a discrete research programme on this topic: DFID may choose instead to bring together research questions on related topics and address the links and inter-dependences among them.

During the course of 2008/9 DFID will also develop its research management arrangements in line with the new strategy, in particular by devising processes for research synthesis, by enhancing research delivery mechanisms and embedding a new framework for monitoring and evaluation.

This timetable covers the current financial year and the next (i.e. April 2008 to March 2009 and April 2009 to March 2010). The timetable will be updated periodically, usually every quarter. It is not a detailed work plan and entries may be subject to change.

Source: R4D

Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has shown that lakeside communities are often the source of cholera outbreaks.

DRC health department officials plan to alter how they combat cholera following the research, which said that current efforts “failed to achieve long-term control”.

[...]

Most previous DRC cholera control efforts have targeted city residents, the researchers say. They recommend refocusing prevention and control efforts on lakeside communities. These are smaller populations, making such programmes more affordable.

And cities might be best protected by first targeting limited resources - including safe water - within these smaller communities that are likely to form the initial outbreak.

“We want to make sure that, by 2012, access to safe water is assured by providing potable water to communities through pipes, rather than using water from lakes,” says lead author, physician and epidemiologist Didier Bompangue from the DRC Health Ministry.

Link to full article in May edition of Emerging Infectious Diseases here

Read more: Aimable Twahirwa and Christina Scott, SciDev.Net, 9 May 2008

Tapela, B.N. (2008).  Livelihoods in the wake of agricultural commercialisation in South Africa’s poverty nodes : insights from small-scale irrigation schemes in Limpopo Province
Development Southern Africa, vol. 25, no. 2 ; p. 181-198
DOI: 10.1080/03768350802090584

Abstract

Small-scale irrigation farming is envisaged to play a progressively larger role in rural development and to help reduce some inequalities in South Africa’s space economy. Since the late 1990s, the government has aimed to ‘revitalise’ government-owned small-scale irrigation schemes, many located in former homelands. Its macro-policy shifts seem to favour the creation of a black farming elite. Important questions are whether neoliberal policies will harm the poorest and most vulnerable in irrigation farming communities, and whether a new class of petty commodity producers can establish themselves in global commodity chains. This paper looks at vulnerability and marginalisation in selected small-scale irrigation schemes in Limpopo Province. The findings suggest that existing approaches to agricultural commercialisation may not reduce rural poverty and inequality. Although these approaches help to integrate resource-poor irrigation farmers into globalised commodity production sectors, they could undermine the livelihoods of the poorest and most vulnerable in these communities.

Pistia stratiotes, or the common water lettuce found in most tropical areas, can mop up toxic metals from municipal sludge. Indian scientists report the plant’s fronds and roots accumulate substantial amounts of metals. The plant fights any damage to itself by increasing antioxidant activity and levels of carotenes.

Anamika Tewari, A. … [et al.] (2008). Amelioration of municipal sludge by Pistia stratiotes L. : role of antioxidant enzymes in detoxification of metals
Bioresource Technology, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 21 May 2008. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2008.04.018

13 Percent Still Practise Open Defecation - Washing hands before eating food can halve diarrhoea, RTI patients Reveals ICDDR,B survey

The Health Impact Study Baseline Survey, conducted by International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, (ICDDR,B) last year, revealed that still 13 percent people are practising open defecation and the practice is most common among children and the hard core poor.

The rate of open defecation among the children and hard core poor is 20 to 50 percent, the baseline survey revealed.

UNICEF and Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) organised the survey conducted under the Sanitation, Hygiene, Education and Water Supply in Bangladesh (SHEWA-B) project. (…)

Background on Sanitation, Hygiene Education and Water Supply in Bangladesh (SHEWAB)

See details of DFID’s core funding of this initiative in the project record on R4D for the ICDDR,B Grant 2006-11

See also the abstract of presentation given by Lisa Danquah of the University of Southampton on 29 Januray 2008 on “UNICEF Shewa-B -Findings from Structured Observations, Health Impact Study (HIS)”

Sources: Daily Star, 28 May 2008 and R4D, 29 May 2008

The UK government is to launch a new programme to help developing countries apply cutting-edge developments in areas such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and information and communication technology (ICT) to meet the needs of the poor.

It has also pledged to provide a “significant increase” in funding for research communication and techniques for increasing the impact of research results, describing communication as a field in which the United Kingdom must “continue to earn our reputation as a leader”.

Both moves are included in the new five-year research strategy [1] for the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

It follows a previous commitment to double funding for development-related research to £1 billion (US$1.98 billion).

The new strategy focuses on six areas: enhancing growth to reduce poverty; promoting sustainable agriculture; boosting research on climate change; improving health treatments and systems; tackling “challenging” governance problems, and meeting future challenges and opportunities.

Source: David Dickson, SciDev.Net, 23 Apr 2008

[1] DFID. (2008). Research Strategy 2008 - 2013. PDF file

Excerpts related to WASH:

3. Creating and using new technologies

We will help fund technologies that are developed locally, in particular for clean
energy and clean water. We will work with partners such as China, India and Brazil
to support the transfer of technology between southern countries. (p. 19)

4 Tackling the MDGs that are hardest to reach

Slow progress in the MDGs for water, sanitation, education, health and hunger is closely related to a failure to recognise and address challenges with political processes and social development.

We will have a new programme of multi-country research which will focus on those MDGs that are hardest to reach. It will add to research from more stable environments. We will use social and political sciences to come up with new solutions, and we will research how we can:

• achieve the water and sanitation MDGs;
• provide education in difficult environments (for example, how do we reach the most excluded children - in particular girls); and
• achieve better food security and nutrition. (p. 33)

The implementation of a dengue control programme in Puerto Rico led to the discovery of previously unknown mosquito breeding sites underground. Research published in the March 2008 issue of Medical and Veterinary Entomology showed that large number of mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti), which transmit dengue fever to humans, were found to breed in septic tanks.

R. Barrera, M. Amador, A. Diaz, J. Smith, J. L. Munoz-Jordan, Y. Rosario (2008). Unusual productivity of Aedes aegypti in septic tanks and its implications for dengue control.
Medical and Veterinary Entomology ; vol. 22, no. 1 ; p. 62-69. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2915.2008.00720.x
Contact: Roberto Barrera, Dengue Branch, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 1324 Calle Cañada, San Juan 00920, Puerto Rico. Tel.: + 1 787 706 2399; Fax: + 1 787 706 2496; E-mail: rbarrera@cdc.gov

Abstract.

Increased DEN-2 virus transmission in Puerto Rico during 2005 prompted the implementation of a rapid intervention programme to suppress Aedes aegypti (L.) (Diptera: Culicidae) emergence, which in turn lead to the discovery of previously unknown breeding sites underground. Initially, the following control measures were applied in Playa/Playita (PP), a town of 1,400 households, to all areas where the number of pupae per person exceeded the expected threshold for dengue transmission; all containers likely to be aquatic habitats were turned over and containers too large to turn were treated with 1 p.p.m. methoprene. The impact of these interventions was evaluated by comparing the number of resting adult mosquitoes (by backpack aspiration and sweepnetting in bedrooms) pre-intervention, with numbers at 3 and 5 weeks post-intervention, and by evaluating pupal density at 4 weeks post-intervention in PP and in a nearby town, Coqui (CO; 1500 households), which was not treated. The pre-intervention and post-intervention densities of resting Ae. aegypti adults were significantly larger in the intervention town, although the density of pupae in surface containers was low and similar in both towns at 4 weeks post-intervention. At 3 weeks post-intervention, the density of resting adults decreased by only 18% of pre-intervention levels, but returned to pre-intervention levels 5 weeks after treatment. By contrast, the density of resting adults in CO steadily decreased to 48% and 61%, at 3 and 5 weeks after the initial surveys, respectively. Geographical Information Systems identified significant clustering of adult mosquitoes, which led to the discovery of underground aquatic habitats (septic tanks) that were producing large numbers of Ae. aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus (Say) in the treated town. We calculated that septic tanks could produce > 18 000 Ae. aegypti and ~ 170 000 Cx quinquefasciatus adults per day. Septic tanks are likely to be common and widespread in suburban and rural Puerto Rico, where, apparently, they can contribute significantly to the maintenance of island-wide dengue virus endemicity.

Organised by: Sida’s unit for Research Cooperation and Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development, Uppsala University and Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences

The Sida biennial conferences provide a forum for the discussion of problems concerning humanity and nature in the North, South, East and West. At this year’s conference, researchers and development professionals will gather to discuss key themes at the frontiers of research and global development issues.

Themes will include sustainable energy systems, maternal and child health, water and sanitation, soil degradation, sustainable agriculture and survival strategies of the poor.

WASH-related sessions include:

26 May - 13.20-14.20 Parallel sessions
Water and sanitation
Dr Sofia Boqvist, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

29 May - 09.00-10.20 Parallel sessions
Soil degradation and water scarcity - continuous causes of rural poverty
Prof Emeritus Gunnar Jacks, Royal Institute of Technology

Target group: Sida/Sarec financed scientists, Sida staff and all others with an interest in the research areas presented.

The maximum number of participants has been reached but registration is still possible, you will be added to a reserve list.

For full information go to conference web site