There’s an interesting article in the Spring 2010 issue of Planet Earth* Groundwater − returning to the sources. Here’s what the intro. blurb says:
Many people in Africa depend on groundwater, but exploiting it effectively depends on accurate information about where to find it – and this information is expensive to obtain. Yet in many cases, researchers did the work years ago – it's just a matter of tracking down their results. Jude Cobbing and Jeff Davies describe a new initiative to make data from old studies more accessible – and in doing so, improve scientific cooperation and the availability of water in Africa.
Many people (students in particular) think useful data have to come from recent sources – they have to be available on the Internet, otherwise they ain’t much use. So an initiative like this, to get “old” knowledge on the Internet, is very welcome. After all, reinventing wheels is expensive and a massive waste of time.
This article is about groundwater, but in sanitation there’s also lots of good “old” knowledge (some of which is on the Internet) which many of today’s professionals (never mind students) simply don’t know about. So they reinvent some wheels – e.g., sanitation planning tools, latrine designs, and so on. Time to get real!
* Planet Earth is a free magazine published by NERC (the UK Natural Environment Research Council) and aimed at non-specialists with an interest in environmental science.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
ITT’s World Water Day Campaign
“ITT employees and water supporters rallied together to support ITT Watermark’s nonprofit partners, adding 4,486 fans to the ITT Watermark Facebook page in just one week and raising US$ 4,486 through ITT’s commitment to donate $1 to safe water solutions for every new fan between March 22 and 26 in honor of World Water Day” – see blog of 19 March. Well done, ITT!
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Japanese flush toilets!
Read The weird and wonderful world of the Japanese Washlet (Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2009) – truly amazing! Let’s hope they don’t catch on in developing countries!
10 million trees a year!
“Worldwide, the equivalent of almost 270,000 trees is either flushed or dumped in landfills every day and roughly 10 percent of that total is attributable to toilet paper”, says Noelle Robbins in the May/June issue of World Watch Magazine. That’s flushing down toilets nearly 10 million trees a year! It certainly makes you think.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
IRC electronic library
The IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre has just published a library of all its e-publications in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese (up to this month); it’s also available on a CD-ROM. This is a really helpful move, especially as IRC publications are of such high quality. The Thematic Overview Papers are particularly useful. Well done, IRC!
2010 GLAAS report
GLAAS is UN Water’s ‘Global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water’ and the 2010 GLAAS report has just been published. Read it!
The Press Release for its launch in Washington, DC on 21 April contains a startling statement under the heading “Sanitation and water must no longer play second fiddle to other priorities. Countries with the greatest unmet sanitation and water needs most often receive little or no aid”:
Between 1997 and 2008, aid commitments for sanitation and water fell from 8% of total development aid to 5%, lower than commitments for health, education, transport, energy and agriculture. … This drop occurred despite compelling evidence that achieving the water and sanitation target of the Millennium Development Goals would lower health-care costs, increase school attendance and boost productivity. Despite these clear benefits for human and economic development, many countries and donors are still not allocating sufficient attention and resources to water and sanitation.
“Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and the lack of hygiene claim the lives of an estimated 2.2 million children under the age of 5 every year. Of these deaths, 1.5 million are due to diarrhoea, the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease,” said Dr. Neira [WHO’s Director of Public Health and Environment]. “The impact of diarrhoeal disease in children under 15 is greater than the combined impact of HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.”
Nothing we didn’t already know, of course, but still very useful to have these things said again and again − and again and again.
We’ve just had the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme’s 2010 report. I just wonder if these JMP and GLAAS reports shouldn’t somehow be combined. There’s also the 2009 Millennium Development Goals Report which has a rather good 2½-page summary on sanitation and water.
The Press Release for its launch in Washington, DC on 21 April contains a startling statement under the heading “Sanitation and water must no longer play second fiddle to other priorities. Countries with the greatest unmet sanitation and water needs most often receive little or no aid”:
Between 1997 and 2008, aid commitments for sanitation and water fell from 8% of total development aid to 5%, lower than commitments for health, education, transport, energy and agriculture. … This drop occurred despite compelling evidence that achieving the water and sanitation target of the Millennium Development Goals would lower health-care costs, increase school attendance and boost productivity. Despite these clear benefits for human and economic development, many countries and donors are still not allocating sufficient attention and resources to water and sanitation.
“Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and the lack of hygiene claim the lives of an estimated 2.2 million children under the age of 5 every year. Of these deaths, 1.5 million are due to diarrhoea, the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease,” said Dr. Neira [WHO’s Director of Public Health and Environment]. “The impact of diarrhoeal disease in children under 15 is greater than the combined impact of HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.”
Nothing we didn’t already know, of course, but still very useful to have these things said again and again − and again and again.
We’ve just had the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme’s 2010 report. I just wonder if these JMP and GLAAS reports shouldn’t somehow be combined. There’s also the 2009 Millennium Development Goals Report which has a rather good 2½-page summary on sanitation and water.
Friday, 2 April 2010
Stunting in Brazil
There’s a brilliant paper in this month’s Bulletin of the World Health Organization: Narrowing socioeconomic inequality in child stunting: the Brazilian experience, 1974–2007 [stunting is low height-for-age*]. The findings of the paper, taken from the Abstract, are:
Over a 33-year period, we documented a steady decline in the national prevalence of stunting from 37.1% to 7.1%. Prevalence dropped from 59.0% to 11.2% in the poorest quintile and from 12.1% to 3.3% among the wealthiest quintile. The decline was particularly steep in the last 10 years of the period (1996 to 2007), when the gaps between poor and wealthy families with children under 5 were also reduced in terms of purchasing power; access to education, health care and water and sanitation services; and reproductive health indicators.
This figure shows the results:
Prevalence of stunting (%), by wealth quintile, over the 33 year period 1974−2007
The authors conclude:
In Brazil, socioeconomic development coupled with equity-oriented public policies has been accompanied by marked improvements in living conditions and a substantial decline in child undernutrition, as well as a reduction of the gap in nutritional status between children in the highest and lowest socioeconomic quintiles.
The paper has good data on the percentages, by wealth quintile, of households served by public water supply, by public sewerage systems, and with flush toilets:
Percentage of households with piped water supply connection, by wealth quintile, in 1996 and 2007/07
Percentage of households with flush toilets, by wealth quintile, in 1996 and 2007/07
Percentage of households with sewerage connection, by wealth quintile, in 1996 and 2007/07
So Brazil seems to be doing rather well for its poor!
*Note: two good references on stunting:
(1) Early childhood diarrhoea and helminthiases associated with long-term linear growth faltering (International Journal of Epidemiology 2001: 30, 1457−1464), and
(2) Child undernutrition, tropical enteropathy, toilets, and handwashing (The Lancet 2009: 374, 1032−1035) [see also blogs of 18 September and 23 September 2009].
Over a 33-year period, we documented a steady decline in the national prevalence of stunting from 37.1% to 7.1%. Prevalence dropped from 59.0% to 11.2% in the poorest quintile and from 12.1% to 3.3% among the wealthiest quintile. The decline was particularly steep in the last 10 years of the period (1996 to 2007), when the gaps between poor and wealthy families with children under 5 were also reduced in terms of purchasing power; access to education, health care and water and sanitation services; and reproductive health indicators.
This figure shows the results:
Prevalence of stunting (%), by wealth quintile, over the 33 year period 1974−2007
The authors conclude:
In Brazil, socioeconomic development coupled with equity-oriented public policies has been accompanied by marked improvements in living conditions and a substantial decline in child undernutrition, as well as a reduction of the gap in nutritional status between children in the highest and lowest socioeconomic quintiles.
The paper has good data on the percentages, by wealth quintile, of households served by public water supply, by public sewerage systems, and with flush toilets:
Percentage of households with piped water supply connection, by wealth quintile, in 1996 and 2007/07
Percentage of households with flush toilets, by wealth quintile, in 1996 and 2007/07
Percentage of households with sewerage connection, by wealth quintile, in 1996 and 2007/07
So Brazil seems to be doing rather well for its poor!
*Note: two good references on stunting:
(1) Early childhood diarrhoea and helminthiases associated with long-term linear growth faltering (International Journal of Epidemiology 2001: 30, 1457−1464), and
(2) Child undernutrition, tropical enteropathy, toilets, and handwashing (The Lancet 2009: 374, 1032−1035) [see also blogs of 18 September and 23 September 2009].
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