Hi Elisabeth

I appreciate the suggestion and will just post a single key study in the future rather than a list.

Dan

muench wrote: Thank you, Kris, for picking out certain aspects that you find most important; both of them are indeed intriguing. Which of the articles spoke about 60% sanitation coverage as a minimum to see effects?

The 'Exposure–response relationship of neighbourhood sanitation and children’s diarrhea' one if I remember correctly. It is a bit hidden as a factor of '0.6' probably because the authors themselves are not so sure about it.

Regarding the urban/rural devide: I think this is an artifact of how effects are measured. If you just look at early childhood deaths then urban areas often look better as easily accessed medical services (even if expensive) often do prevent deaths there.

Dear Dan,
Thanks for repeating the post from Sanitation Updates on "Recent WASH research" here on the Forum. Would you be ably to make the post a bit more focused though, i.e. is this research on health aspects primarily? Or research on anything WASH-related? If it is on health, then I would prefer to move it to the health category of the forum.

I actually get a bit overwhelmed if you put 10 new articles into one post... Probably each of them would warrant a discussion thread on their own where we could get in touch with the authors...
Thank you, Kris, for picking out certain aspects that you find most important; both of them are indeed intriguing. Which of the articles spoke about 60% sanitation coverage as a minimum to see effects? That last one on population density is an interesting one. The comparison on health outcomes for urban people was new to me:

Studies on child health in developing countries often find that children are healthier in urban areas than in rural areas. There are many reasons for this disparity. People in urban areas tend to be richer and better educated. Further, more densely populated places are more likely to have easier access to health services that matter for child survival and development, such as trained doctors, maternal care, and medicines.

www.niussp.org/article/population-densit...t-sante-des-enfants/

Hmmm, "richer and better educated" if you live in an urban slum? Might be a bit of an over-generalisation.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Thanks for posting this.
Lets see if that figure of minimum of 60% sanitation coverage for effects to start being measurable (see neighbourhood sanitation study) holds up to further investigation. It could also be combined with the identified population density to OD relation of the study further below. While the latter just confirms what has been a common assumption for long, it still gives some interesting harder data to work with.

There have been some interesting studies published so far in June
There are links to the abstracts or full text of the studies below on Sanitation Updates :

Tropical Medicine & International Health, June 2017

• Mouthing of Soil Contaminated Objects is Associated with Environmental Enteropathy in Young Children (Abstract/order)
• Exposure–response relationship of neighbourhood sanitation and children’s diarrhea (Abstract/order)
• Behaviour change intervention to improve shared toilet maintenance and cleanliness in urban slums of Dhaka: A cluster-randomized controlled trial (Abstract/order)

Environmental Health Perspectives, June 2017

• Drinking Water Salinity and Raised Blood Pressure: Evidence from a Cohort Study in Coastal Bangladesh
• Manganese in Drinking Water and Cognitive Abilities and Behavior at 10 Years of Age: A Prospective Cohort Study

American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, early view

• Household and Individual Risk Factors for Cholera among Cholera Vaccine Recipients in Rural Haiti
• Infant Nutritional Status, Feeding Practices, Enteropathogen Exposure, Socioeconomic Status, and Illness Are Associated with Gut Barrier Function As Assessed by the Lactulose Mannitol Test in the MAL-ED Birth Cohort]
• Consistency of Use and Effectiveness of Household Water Treatment Among Indian Households Claiming to Treat Their Water (Abstract/order)

Others

• The impact of sanitation on infectious disease and nutritional status: a systematic review and meta-analysis. (Abstract/order). International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, May 2017
• Population density interacts with sanitation to predict child health. NIUSS, May 2017.

Dear Colleagues:

Each week we post a bibliography of recent WASH related research. Below are titles of this week's and links to the full text or abstracts are on Sanitation Updates .

OPEN ACCESS

- The science behind One Health: at the interface of humans, animals, and the environment. Annals NY Academy of Sciences, May 15, 2017.
- The threat of antimicrobial resistance in developing countries: causes and control strategies. Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control, May 15, 2017.
- Sustainability of community-led total sanitation outcomes: Evidence from Ethiopia and Ghana. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, May 2017.
- Assessing patterns and determinants of latrine use in rural settings: A longitudinal study in Odisha, India. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, May 2017.
- Processes and challenges of community mobilisation for latrine promotion under Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in rural Odisha, India. BMC Public Health, May 16, 2017.
- FROM PILOT PROJECT TO EMERGING SANITATION SERVICE. WSUP, May 2017.

ABSTRACT/ORDER

- Predictors of drinking water boiling and bottled water consumption in rural China: A hierarchical modeling approach. Environ. Sci. Technol, May 20, 2017.
- Environmentally sustainable WASH? Current discourse, planetary boundaries and future directions. Jnl of WASH for Development, March 2017.

RECENT NEWS

- John Oldfield- Water Is Global (In)Security. Forbes, May 23, 2017.
- Agencies Launch Water Monitoring Tools and Processes for SDG 6 Reporting. IISD, May 23, 2017.

Links to the full-text of the articles and reports listed below are on Sanitation Updates .

Estimating the Cost and Payment for Sanitation in the Informal Settlements of Kisumu, Kenya: A Cross Sectional Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, January 2017. This study aimed to estimate the cost of sanitation and investigated the social and economic dynamics within Kisumu’s informal settlements that hinder provision and uptake of sanitation facilities.

WASH’Nutrition: A Practical Guidebook on Increasing Nutritional Impact through Integration of WASH and Nutrition Programs. ACF International, January 2017. This operational guidebook demonstrates the importance of both supplementing nutrition programs with WASH activities and adapting WASH interventions to include nutritional considerations (i.e., making them more nutrition-sensitive and impactful on nutrition). It has been developed to provide practitioners with usable information and tools so that they can design and implement effective WASH and nutrition programs.

A Mobile Platform Enables Unprecedented Sanitation Uptake in Zambia. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, January 2017. Akros, in partnership with Zambia’s Ministry of Local Government and Housing and UNICEF, has developed an innovative community-led total sanitation (CLTS) monitoring system called CLTS M2W. It uses mobile phones and engagement of traditional leaders to provide communities with the ability to clearly see their progress toward sanitation goals. CLTS M2W paved the way for unprecedented CLTS uptake in Zambia, facilitating the creation of over 1,500,000 new users of sanitation in 18 months.

Measuring Global Water Security towards Sustainable Development Goals. Environmental Research Letters, December 2016. In this study, the authors present a spatial multi-criteria analysis framework to provide a global assessment of water security. The selected indicators are based on Goal 6 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Disposal of Children’s Stools and its Association with Childhood Diarrhea in India. BMC Public Health, January 2017. Researchers found significant statistical association between children’s stool disposal and diarrhea. They conclude that gains in the reduction of childhood diarrhea can be achieved in India through the complete elimination of unsafe disposal of children’s stools.

Place and Child Health: The Interaction of Population Density and Sanitation in Developing Countries. Demography, January 2017. In this study, researchers assessed whether the importance of dense settlement for infant mortality and child height is influenced by exposure to local sanitation behavior.

Towards “Sustainable” Sanitation: Challenges and Opportunities in Urban Areas. Sustainability, December 2016. This paper reviews challenges associated with providing sanitation systems in urban areas and explores ways to promote sustainable sanitation in cities. It focuses on opportunities to stimulate sustainable sanitation approaches from a resource recovery perspective, generating added value to society while protecting human and ecosystem health.

Publications on Water, Sanitation and Health: 2016. WHO, 2016. This page provides links to WHO 2016 reports on quantitative microbial risk assessment, protecting surface water for health, and household water treatment.