Hygiene and Wrapup

Lessons Learned

Hygiene is often forgotten in the suite of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions. This is unfortunate because, as we learned from the F-diagram, hygiene interventions are needed to block all potential fecal-oral transmission routes.

Furthermore, hygiene behavior change goes beyond hand washing; hygiene is exactly what it sounds like – it is keeping the environment clean. In South Africa, I was involved in a randomized controlled trial for point-of-use water treatment technologies. Preliminary results confirmed that the interventions (Figure 2, groups A and B) had significantly improved potential pathogen load in the drinking water. Other similar studies did not show that POU treatment improved health outcomes as judged by acute diarrhea. Our study was different that we quantified pathogens in children’s’ stool samples through real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and comparison to several known pathogen genetic signatures. Our hypothesis was that acute diarrhea would not significantly change but the pathogen load would decrease. The hope was that the water treatment would reduce the pathogen load and thus reduce the risk of environmental enteropathy.

The conclusion is that hygiene interventions are critical.

Gender Issues

There are significant gender issues in water, sanitation, and hygiene. Even in this link, there are many more. Please read the synopsis in this link and consider the role of gender in water and health.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/4-reasons-water-and-sanitation-are-a-gender-issue/

This is an incomplete consideration of gender issues in water; although, this topic could easily occupy an entire course on its own.