PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

The Lancet Global Health: Widely used sanitation programmes do not necessarily improve health

2014-10-10
(Press-News.org) The sanitation intervention delivered under the terms of the Government of India's Total Sanitation Campaign—the world's largest sanitation initiative—provided almost 25 000 individuals in rural India with access to a latrine. However, it did not reduce exposure to faecal pathogens or decrease the occurrence of diarrhoea, parasitic worm infections, or child malnutrition.

"The programme is effective in building latrines, but not all households participate"*, explains lead author Professor Thomas Clasen from Emory University, Atlanta, USA and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. "Moreover, many householders do not always use the latrines. This, combined with continued exposure from poor hygiene, contaminated water, and unsafe disposal of child faeces, may explain the lack of a health impact."*

Worldwide, around 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation facilities such as a latrine, a third of whom live in India. Two-thirds of the 1.1 billion people who practise open defecation and a quarter of the 1.5 million who die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by poor hygiene and sanitation also live in India.

This cluster randomised trial involved 9480 households (50 951 individuals) in 100 rural villages in Odisha, India with a child younger than 4 years or a pregnant woman. Households in 50 villages were randomly assigned to receive the sanitation intervention in early 2011; control villages received the intervention after a 14–month surveillance period.

The intervention increased the average proportion of households in a village with a latrine from 9% to 63%, compared an increase of 8% to 12% in control villages. However, the researchers found no evidence that the intervention protected against diarrhoea in children younger than 5 years: 7-day prevalence of reported diarrhoea was 8.8% in the intervention group (data from 1919 children) and 9.1% in the control group (1916 children). What is more, the intervention did not reduce the prevalence of parasitic worms that are transmitted via soil and can cause reduced physical growth and impaired cognitive function in children. There was also no impact on child weight or height—measures of nutritional status.

The researchers say that further studies are needed to identify why the intervention failed to improve health, but suggest a number of possible explanations including insufficient coverage and inconsistent use of latrines, or that a lack of handwashing with soap or animal faeces could also be contributing to the disease burden.

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Stephen Luby, Research Deputy Director at the Centre for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford University in the USA says, "This rigorous assessment is important, because it provides the best evidence so far for the uncomfortable conclusion that well -funded, professionally delivered sanitation programmes, even when they reach coverage levels that are quite commendable for large scale interventions, do not necessarily improve health."

He adds, "This absence of sound data for the health effect of sanitation results in a paucity of evidence to guide decisions about whether to invest scarce funds in the improvement of sanitation. Might communities be healthier if the funds were instead invested in water infrastructure, handwashing promotion, rotavirus vaccine, nutritional supplementation, or improvement of clinical management of diarrhoea with oral rehydration and zinc treatment?"

INFORMATION:

Notes to Editors: This study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), and Department for International Development-backed SHARE Research Consortium at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. *Quote direct from author and cannot be found in text of Article.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Recent kidney policy changes have not created racial disparities in care

2014-10-10
Washington, DC (October 9, 2014) — Recent policy and guideline changes related to the care of patients with kidney failure have not created racial disparities, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Such studies are needed to ensure that all patients continue to receive the highest quality of care after such changes are implemented. In 2011, the End-Stage Renal Disease Prospective Payment System went into effect, which changed the way dialysis facilities were paid for care related to kidney ...

Electrically conductive plastics promising for batteries, solar cells

2014-10-10
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – An emerging class of electrically conductive plastics called "radical polymers" may bring low-cost, transparent solar cells, flexible and lightweight batteries and ultrathin antistatic coatings for consumer electronics and aircraft. Researchers have established the solid-state electrical properties of one such polymer, called PTMA, which is about 10 times more electrically conductive than common semiconducting polymers. "It's a polymer glass that conducts charge, which seems like a contradiction because glasses are usually insulators," said ...

Migrating animals' pee affects ocean chemistry

2014-10-09
The largest migration on the planet is the movement of small animals from the surface of the open ocean, where they feed on plants under cover of darkness, to the sunless depths where they hide from predators during the day. University of Washington researchers have found that this regular migration helps shape our oceans. During the daylight hours below the surface the animals release ammonia, the equivalent of our urine, that turns out to play a significant role in marine chemistry, particularly in low-oxygen zones. Results are published online this week in the Proceedings ...

Penn Medicine's 'sepsis sniffer' generates faster sepsis care and suggests reduced mortality

Penn Medicines sepsis sniffer generates faster sepsis care and suggests reduced mortality
2014-10-09
PHILADELPHIA - An automated early warning and response system for sepsis developed by Penn Medicine experts has resulted in a marked increase in sepsis identification and care, transfer to the ICU, and an indication of fewer deaths due to sepsis. A study assessing the tool is published online in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection; it can severely impair the body's organs, causing them to fail. There are as many as three million cases of severe sepsis and 750,000 resulting deaths in the United States ...

Manipulating memory with light

Manipulating memory with light
2014-10-09
Just look into the light: not quite, but researchers at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology have used light to erase specific memories in mice, and proved a basic theory of how different parts of the brain work together to retrieve episodic memories. Optogenetics, pioneered by Karl Diesseroth at Stanford University, is a new technique for manipulating and studying nerve cells using light. The techniques of optogenetics are rapidly becoming the standard method for investigating brain function. Kazumasa Tanaka, Brian Wiltgen and colleagues ...

Space-based methane maps find largest US signal in Southwest

2014-10-09
ANN ARBOR—An unexpectedly high amount of the climate-changing gas methane, the main component of natural gas, is escaping from the Four Corners region in the U.S. Southwest, according to a new study by the University of Michigan and NASA. The researchers mapped satellite data to uncover the nation's largest methane signal seen from space. They measured levels of the gas emitted from all sources, and found more than half a teragram per year coming from the area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. That's about as much methane as the entire coal, oil, ...

Plant communities in Holy Land can cope with climate change of 'biblical' dimensions

2014-10-09
An international research team comprised of German, Israeli and American ecologists, including Dr. Claus Holzapfel, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University-Newark, has conducted unique long-term experiments in Israel to test predictions of climate change, and has concluded that plant communities in the Holy Land can cope with climate change of "biblical" dimensions. Their findings appear in the current issue of Nature Communications at http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141006/ncomms6102/pdf/ncomms6102.pdf. When taking global climate change into account, many ...

NASA's Hubble maps the temperature and water vapor on an extreme exoplanet

NASAs Hubble maps the temperature and water vapor on an extreme exoplanet
2014-10-09
A team of scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made the most detailed global map yet of the glow from a turbulent planet outside our solar system, revealing its secrets of air temperatures and water vapor. Hubble observations show the exoplanet, called WASP-43b, is no place to call home. It is a world of extremes, where seething winds howl at the speed of sound from a 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit "day" side, hot enough to melt steel, to a pitch-black "night" side with plunging temperatures below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Astronomers have mapped the temperatures ...

DNA nano-foundries cast custom-shaped metal nanoparticles

2014-10-09
Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have unveiled a new method to form tiny 3D metal nanoparticles in prescribed shapes and dimensions using DNA, Nature's building block, as a construction mold. The ability to mold inorganic nanoparticles out of materials such as gold and silver in precisely designed 3D shapes is a significant breakthrough that has the potential to advance laser technology, microscopy, solar cells, electronics, environmental testing, disease detection and more. "We built tiny foundries made ...

Balancing birds and biofuels: Grasslands support more species than cornfields

2014-10-09
MADISON, Wis. – In Wisconsin, bioenergy is for the birds. Really. In a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) scientists examined whether corn and perennial grassland fields in southern Wisconsin could provide both biomass for bioenergy production and bountiful bird habitat. The research team found that where there are grasslands, there are birds. Grass-and-wildflower-dominated fields supported more than three times as many bird species as cornfields, including 10 imperiled ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Exercise as an anti-ageing intervention to avoid detrimental impact of mental fatigue

UMass Amherst Nursing Professor Emerita honored as ‘Living Legend’

New guidelines aim to improve cystic fibrosis screening

Picky eaters by day, buffet by night: Butterfly, moth diets sync to plant aromas

Pennington Biomedical’s Dr. Leanne Redman honored with the E. V. McCollum Award from the American Society for Nutrition

CCNY physicists uncover electronic interactions mediated via spin waves

Researchers’ 3D-printing formula may transform future of foam

Nurture more important than nature for robotic hand

Drug-delivering aptamers target leukemia stem cells for one-two knockout punch

New study finds that over 95% of sponsored influencer posts on Twitter were not disclosed

New sea grant report helps great lakes fish farmers navigate aquaculture regulations

Strain “trick” improves perovskite solar cells’ efficiency

How GPS helps older drivers stay on the roads

Estrogen and progesterone stimulate the body to make opioids

Dancing with the cells – how acoustically levitating a diamond led to a breakthrough in biotech automation

Machine learning helps construct an evolutionary timeline of bacteria

Cellular regulator of mRNA vaccine revealed... offering new therapeutic options

Animal behavioral diversity at risk in the face of declining biodiversity

Finding their way: GPS ignites independence in older adult drivers

Antibiotic resistance among key bacterial species plateaus over time

‘Some insects are declining but what’s happening to the other 99%?’

Powerful new software platform could reshape biomedical research by making data analysis more accessible

Revealing capillaries and cells in living organs with ultrasound

American College of Physicians awards $260,000 in grants to address equity challenges in obesity care

Researchers from MARE ULisboa discover that the European catfish, an invasive species in Portugal, has a prolonged breeding season, enhancing its invasive potential

Rakesh K. Jain, PhD, FAACR, honored with the 2025 AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research

Solar cells made of moon dust could power future space exploration

Deporting immigrants may further shrink the health care workforce

Border region emergency medical services in migrant emergency care

Resident physician intentions regarding unionization

[Press-News.org] The Lancet Global Health: Widely used sanitation programmes do not necessarily improve health