Friday, 25 November 2011
Tempus fugit!
Time passes. A few excuses: quite a bit of work, despite retirement; some ill health; a lot of grandparenting; and a few spells of general indolence! But I’m more or less back on track, so watch this space again.
Friday, 19 November 2010
HSW in PLoS Medicine
Last week and earlier this week PLoS Medicine published a collection of four papers on hygiene, sanitation, and water (HSW) in developing countries. They are:
1. Hygiene, Sanitation, and Water: Forgotten Foundations of Health
2. Water Supply and Health
3. Sanitation and Health
4. Hygiene, Sanitation, and Water: What Needs to Be Done?
You can access and download them here. Check out other PLoS Medicine Collections here.
[PLoS - Public Library of Science, an organization that publishes "open access" papers in a variety of e-journals.]
1. Hygiene, Sanitation, and Water: Forgotten Foundations of Health
2. Water Supply and Health
3. Sanitation and Health
4. Hygiene, Sanitation, and Water: What Needs to Be Done?
You can access and download them here. Check out other PLoS Medicine Collections here.
[PLoS - Public Library of Science, an organization that publishes "open access" papers in a variety of e-journals.]
World Toilet Day
Today is World Toilet Day. Check out the website here and look at the posters here – this is one of them:
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Fallacious arguments
In Sandec News No. 11 (published in August) there’s an article (pages 14−15) by Mbaye Mbéguéré, Pierre-Henri Dodane, Ousmane Sow and Doulaye Koné on “Financial Assessment of Dakar’s Sewer vs Faecal Sludge Management”. Here’s the intro. blurb:
In Senegal’s capital Dakar, with its approx. three million inhabitants, investment and O&M costs of the conventional, centralised sewer system are considerably higher than those of the on-site faecal sludge management (FSM) system. The income generated by user fees is insufficient to cover the expenses of the centralised sewer system, yet recovery of FSM charges appears easier.
The implication seems to be that, because FSM is cheaper than conventional sewerage, it’s a good thing to do. This is the “EcoSan fallacy” (see blog of 30 November 2008): if it (whatever "it" may be) is cheaper than conventional sewerage, then you should use it. The nonsense of this way of “thinking” is rapidly understood when you remember that everything’s cheaper than conventional sewerage, as John Kalbermatten found in the 1970s (see here) and as more recently determined in South Africa (here). What’s needed is a comparison between “it” (even “them”) and simplified sewerage.
All rather tiresome!
In Senegal’s capital Dakar, with its approx. three million inhabitants, investment and O&M costs of the conventional, centralised sewer system are considerably higher than those of the on-site faecal sludge management (FSM) system. The income generated by user fees is insufficient to cover the expenses of the centralised sewer system, yet recovery of FSM charges appears easier.
The implication seems to be that, because FSM is cheaper than conventional sewerage, it’s a good thing to do. This is the “EcoSan fallacy” (see blog of 30 November 2008): if it (whatever "it" may be) is cheaper than conventional sewerage, then you should use it. The nonsense of this way of “thinking” is rapidly understood when you remember that everything’s cheaper than conventional sewerage, as John Kalbermatten found in the 1970s (see here) and as more recently determined in South Africa (here). What’s needed is a comparison between “it” (even “them”) and simplified sewerage.
All rather tiresome!
Graduate education
There’s a brilliant paper by Professor John Briscoe (of Harvard University) in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management [American Society of Civil Engineers, 2010: 136 (4), 409−411]: Practice and Teaching of American Water Management in a Changing World. He makes the point that decades ago students came from all over the world to American universities to be well trained at Masters level in water resources and sanitary engineering. Briscoe notes that, while the world has changed (and still is changing), the courses haven’t (at least not sufficiently) and therefore the US is losing its place in the world of graduate education: what happens now in the US simply isn’t relevant any more to the needs of middle- and low-income countries; similarly what’s needed in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is not wholly relevant to the needs of most countries in Latin America.
I suspect this sorry state of educational affairs also occurs in most other industrialized countries – in the UK, for example, you can easily count on the fingers of one hand the universities who offer appropriate graduate training in environmental health engineering for warm-climate countries (you might need both hands if you wanted to include western Europe).
►See also Declining by degree in The Economist of 4 September.
I suspect this sorry state of educational affairs also occurs in most other industrialized countries – in the UK, for example, you can easily count on the fingers of one hand the universities who offer appropriate graduate training in environmental health engineering for warm-climate countries (you might need both hands if you wanted to include western Europe).
►See also Declining by degree in The Economist of 4 September.
Friday, 1 October 2010
UN MDG Summit – 3
►Watch UN MDG Summit: First reaction – an interview on Global Health TV with journalist Madeleine Buntin of The Guardian (a UK daily newspaper). ►Listen to her in this Guardian Focus podcast: Millennium development goals.
►Read WaterAid’s verdict: UN Summit outcome doesn't make the grade. ►Watch Barbara Frost (WaterAid’s Chief Executive) talk about WaterAid's response to the MDG summit.
►Read WaterAid’s verdict: UN Summit outcome doesn't make the grade. ►Watch Barbara Frost (WaterAid’s Chief Executive) talk about WaterAid's response to the MDG summit.
Thursday, 30 September 2010
The Urban Disaster
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has just published The World Disasters Report 2010 − Focus on Urban Risk. It’s excellent! Here are some excerpts (not much new to WatSan folk, but good that it’s out there for more people to read):
Chapter 5: “Urban risk to health”:
The rapid rise in the number of people living in urban centres and cities around the globe brings with it new forms of urban risk in the health sector. It is a tragic irony, but millions of people continue to be exposed daily to diseases that medical science has long known how to prevent and / or to cure. Acute respiratory infections, dysentery and diarrhoea, largely under control in cities in high-income countries, continue to exact a significant toll on the health and well-being of a disproportionate number of those who live in the sprawling slums of the developing world. …
The other end of the urban health spectrum can be found in low- and middleincome countries where most of the world’s impoverished urban dwellers live. In households lacking basic shelter services – water supply and sanitation in particular – the prevalence rate of diarrhoea among urban children soars, averaging 38 per cent in Pakistan, 33.3 per cent in Cameroon, 23.9 per cent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and 32.3 per cent in Jordan. Diarrhoeal diseases account for nearly 2 million deaths out of a total of almost 10 million among children under the age of 5. …
In many cases and especially in the developing world, urbanization has taken place so quickly that governments have struggled to keep up when it comes to providing needed infrastructure. When people are crowded together in unsanitary conditions, disease thrives. A 2005 report in The Lancet estimated that nearly half the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America has one or more of the main communicable diseases associated with inadequate water and sanitation – including diarrhoea and worm infections.
and Chapter 7: “Urban governance and disaster risk reduction”:
The quality and capacity of local government in a city have an enormous influence on the level of risk that its population faces from disasters and, in particular, on whether risk-reducing infrastructure serves everyone including those living in low-income areas. Local or municipal governments also influence whether provision has been made to remove or reduce disaster risk from events such as floods and large-scale fires or to build into the city the capacity to withstand potential disaster events such as earthquakes. The quality and capacity of local government also have an enormous influence on the levels of risk from everyday hazards that can contribute much to mortality, injury or illness but that are not considered disasters, such as vector-borne diseases and traffic accidents. These risks are not an inherent characteristic of cities but the result of the limitations of their governments in meeting their responsibilities and, more broadly, of limitations of governance including the quality of their relations with the inhabitants and civil society organizations.
Most of what local governments do, or should be doing, is about reducing risks for their populations through ensuring services such as good provision for water, sanitation, drainage, solid waste collection, healthcare, all-weather access roads, electricity, emergency services and provision for transport and traffic management. They should also ensure health and safety standards are met. Even if provision for some of these are contracted to private enterprises or provided by higher levels of government, it is usually the responsibility of local government to coordinate or oversee their provision. Local governments that support meeting development needs reduce disaster risk.
BUT:
1,105,352
is the number of people reported killed in disasters in the ten years 2000−2009 (Table 2 in Annex 1), whereas
1,600,000
is the number of people killed by diarrhoea in one year − 1.5 million under-fives and 1.1 million over-fives [see Diarrhoea: Why children are still dying and what can be done (WHO/UNICEF, 2009) and Diarrhoea kills over a million over-fives each year (SciDev, 2009)].
Chapter 5: “Urban risk to health”:
The rapid rise in the number of people living in urban centres and cities around the globe brings with it new forms of urban risk in the health sector. It is a tragic irony, but millions of people continue to be exposed daily to diseases that medical science has long known how to prevent and / or to cure. Acute respiratory infections, dysentery and diarrhoea, largely under control in cities in high-income countries, continue to exact a significant toll on the health and well-being of a disproportionate number of those who live in the sprawling slums of the developing world. …
The other end of the urban health spectrum can be found in low- and middleincome countries where most of the world’s impoverished urban dwellers live. In households lacking basic shelter services – water supply and sanitation in particular – the prevalence rate of diarrhoea among urban children soars, averaging 38 per cent in Pakistan, 33.3 per cent in Cameroon, 23.9 per cent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and 32.3 per cent in Jordan. Diarrhoeal diseases account for nearly 2 million deaths out of a total of almost 10 million among children under the age of 5. …
In many cases and especially in the developing world, urbanization has taken place so quickly that governments have struggled to keep up when it comes to providing needed infrastructure. When people are crowded together in unsanitary conditions, disease thrives. A 2005 report in The Lancet estimated that nearly half the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America has one or more of the main communicable diseases associated with inadequate water and sanitation – including diarrhoea and worm infections.
and Chapter 7: “Urban governance and disaster risk reduction”:
The quality and capacity of local government in a city have an enormous influence on the level of risk that its population faces from disasters and, in particular, on whether risk-reducing infrastructure serves everyone including those living in low-income areas. Local or municipal governments also influence whether provision has been made to remove or reduce disaster risk from events such as floods and large-scale fires or to build into the city the capacity to withstand potential disaster events such as earthquakes. The quality and capacity of local government also have an enormous influence on the levels of risk from everyday hazards that can contribute much to mortality, injury or illness but that are not considered disasters, such as vector-borne diseases and traffic accidents. These risks are not an inherent characteristic of cities but the result of the limitations of their governments in meeting their responsibilities and, more broadly, of limitations of governance including the quality of their relations with the inhabitants and civil society organizations.
Most of what local governments do, or should be doing, is about reducing risks for their populations through ensuring services such as good provision for water, sanitation, drainage, solid waste collection, healthcare, all-weather access roads, electricity, emergency services and provision for transport and traffic management. They should also ensure health and safety standards are met. Even if provision for some of these are contracted to private enterprises or provided by higher levels of government, it is usually the responsibility of local government to coordinate or oversee their provision. Local governments that support meeting development needs reduce disaster risk.
BUT:
1,105,352
is the number of people reported killed in disasters in the ten years 2000−2009 (Table 2 in Annex 1), whereas
1,600,000
is the number of people killed by diarrhoea in one year − 1.5 million under-fives and 1.1 million over-fives [see Diarrhoea: Why children are still dying and what can be done (WHO/UNICEF, 2009) and Diarrhoea kills over a million over-fives each year (SciDev, 2009)].
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