349 research outputs found
Sandy Cairncross, Maggie Black and Girish Menon - 28 Mar 2008
No full textIn this edition of Audio News, presented by Peter Goodwin, Sandy Cairncross, Maggie Black (Earthscan), and Girish Menon (Water Aid) talk about:
The Last Taboo: Opening The Door On The Global Sanitation Crisis
a book by Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett, published by Earthscan with UNICEF.
A massive improvement in health and wealth in developing countries could be achieved by providing systems to dispose of human excreta safely. A new book: "The Last Taboo" was launched at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine by the Professor of Environmental Health, Sandy Cairncross
Hygiene, sanitation, and water: forgotten foundations of health.
No full textAs the first article in a four-part PLoS Medicine series on water and sanitation, Jamie Bartram and Sandy Cairncross argue that the massive burden of ill health associated with poor hygiene, sanitation, and water supply demands more attention from health professionals and policymakers
Bayard Roberts, Sian Clarke, Sandy Cairncross, Claire Bertschinger and more - 11 August 2008
No full textDerek Thorne and Peter Goodwin talk with:
Bayard Roberts, Siân Clarke, Sandy Cairncross, Claire Bertschinger and Virginia Berridge of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine about:
depression and post traumatic stress disorder in war-torn northern Uganda and the lessons to be drawn from a research project there;
the unexpected additional value of using malaria drugs at regular intervals among school children in Kenya;
the key role of sanitation in preventing infant deaths all over the world and what is being done to improve it;
the life and work of the nurse who inspired Band Aid and Live Aid, as she receives an honorary doctorate;
the "marketing" of health to the British public, as illustrated by the way attitudes to smoking have changed over the years
Hygiene, Sanitation, Water Supply: Forgotten Foundations of Health - 15 November 2010
No full textDiarrhoeal diseases killing millions of babies around the world each year could be prevented by providing good toilets, lavatories or latrines: especially when designed with full participation of local communities so that they are suitable and get used. That's according to Sandy Cairncross, Professor of Environmental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine - co-author of a series of articles just published in the on-line journal: Public Library of Science - Medicine. He discusses the importance of good sanitation and water supplies
Millennium Goals: Mired In Excrement? - 18 September 2010
No full textWithout better lavatories and safe water we will fail to meet the Millennium Development Goals, according to a new report published by the charity WaterAid from researchers in Zambia, Burkina Faso, Bangladesh, Uganda, East Timor, the USA and Great Britain. The authors say that millions of lives are being lost because of governments' and aid agencies' "blind-spots" - leading to sanitation being ignored. International expert on sanitation,Sandy Cairncross Professor of Environmental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, discusses the report with Peter Goodwin
Hygiene, sanitation, and water: what needs to be done?
No full textIn the final article in a four-part PLoS Medicine series on water and sanitation, Sandy Cairncross and colleagues outline what needs to be done to make significant progress in providing more and better hygiene, sanitation, and water for all
Implementation of the hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) method to improve microbiological food safety in peri-urban Mali
No full textDiarrhoeal diseases remain a main cause of preventable death, particularly among
children under five years of age in developing countries. In addition, many studies
related to infant diarrhoea causation have demonstrated that the level of
contamination is higher in weaning foods than in drinking water. Furthermore, many
studies addressed food microbiological contamination and its role in diarrhoea
causation. But few of them resulted in an intervention.
Although the Hazard Analysis, Critical Control Point (HACCP) approach has been
developed and widely applied to food promotion in industrialised countries, and
adapted to small and/or less Developed Businesses, few studies have examined its
relevance to domestic preparation of food. However, these latter predicted that the
implementation of the approach could lead to an improvement of household
bacteriological food safety, but none of them completed the approach to find out how
effective it is.
Therefore, this study aimed to take that work one step further, and carried out a
small-scale intervention developed on the basis of the HACCP approach. This latter
has been extended to health district level in order to find out its impact on microbial
reduction in weaning food.
Experiment: The HACCP approach has been applied step by step, to two selected
weaning foods prepared by 15 volunteer mothers in peri urban Mali. After setting
Critical Control Point (CCP), actions were taken to control, reduce or eliminate
microbial growth at these points. 432 food samples were collected and analysed in
local Laboratory for FC count to assess the effectiveness of the approach. Lessons
learnt were translated into messages delivered in a pilot study.
Pilot study: Sample of 60 volunteer mothers selected randomly was split into two
groups of 30, the first undergoing messages directed to actions implementation, and
the second standing as a control. Bacteriological samples were taken and analysed
and physical parameters were measured,· as in the experiment, in 60 households
before the intervention and data collected set as baseline.
After three weeks training, alongside with observations, foods samples were taken in
both intervention and control households for Fe count in local Laboratory.
Flow diag~ams of foods, Moni and Fish Soup indicated that they were exposed to
contamination at all steps of their preparation and handling. The hazard analysis
confirmed FC contamtnation of all suspected steps except cooking. Four CCPs were
identified for each food (cooking, reheating, child service with cooled food after
cooking, and child service with cooled food after reheating).
The experiment showed that traditional cooking was very effective in FC elimination;
reheating was as effective as cooking when adopted, because no difference existed
between two operations' temperatures (P<0.0001). Behavioural corrective actions
were effective in controlling FC contamination at remaining CCPs (child service after
cooking and child service after reheating).
In conclusion, the HACCP experiment improved significantly the bacterial safety of
the two type of weaning foods studied. Thus its behavioural corrective actions were
translated into educational messages for the following phase aiming to confirm the
effectiveness of the HACCP approach in improving foods safety at household level.
The pilot study data showed the effectiveness of cooking in FC elimination at CCPs
considered. A comparison of seasonal variation of FC contamination levels at CCPs
showed that these levels were higher at Moni cooking CCP in December (cold
season) (P<0.0004) and in August (rainy season) (P<0.0002), compared to June (dry
season). They were also higher at Fish Soup storage CCP in December compared to
August (P< 0.0098). There was significant difference in FC contamination levels
between cooking and storage CCPs, the latter was higher than the former, for both
Moni and Fish Soup (P< 0.0001).
A comparison of FC contamination levels before and after intervention showed that
the intervention was very effective in FC contamination reduction at the two
remaining CCPs (service after cooking and service after reheating), (P<0.0001).
Indeed, at the end of the intervention, contamination levels were less than 10FC/g in
more than 83% of cooled food samples (prior to child service) after cooking and
about 96% of cooled food samples (prior to child service) after reheating. An
assessment of the intervention mothers' ability to perform actions three months later
resulted in a better effect, 83 % to 100% of food samples' FC contam.ination levels
met the standard. The present research findings showed that not only was the
HACCP approach effective in improving home food safety but also, it was relevant for
food hygiene and safety promotion in low income community.
Two research questions were highlighted: firstly, could food safety improvement
achieved through the HACCP approach result in diarrhoea morbidity and mortality
reduction among young children? And secondly, is the approach scalable and cost
effective
Cost-effective health promotion and hygiene behaviour change through community health clubs in Zimbabwe
No full textAlthough safe sanitation and hygiene is critical
for improving family
health,
rural communities
in Sub Saharan Africa have shown little inclination to
change their traditional
behaviour,
and
sanitation coverage has now dropped to 47%
(Cairncross
2003).
With the
Millennium
Development Goals seeking to halve the
2.4 billion
people
without sanitation
by the
year
2015, there is an urgent need to find cost-effective
health
promotion
strategies
that
will
actively engage rural householders in modifying risky
hygiene
behaviour.
This thesis
evaluates an approach, developed over the past
ten
years
in Zimbabwe, in
which
Community
Health Clubs have successfully galvanised
rural
communities
into
active
behaviour
change
leading to a strong demand for sanitation.
In Tsholotsho
District,
after
six months of
weekly
hygiene promotion sessions, at the cost of
US 35c
per
beneficiary,
good
health knowledge
of
nine different topics was 47% higher in the intervention than for the
control, and
latrine
coverage rose to 43% contrasted to 2% in the control
area, with
the
remaining
57%
members
without latrines practicing faecal burial, a method
previously unknown
(p>0.0001). Spot
observations of 736 Health Club households in two
districts
was contrasted
to
172 in
a
control group, and showed highly significant changes
in
17 key hygiene
practices
(p>0.0001)
including hand washing. The study demonstrates that if
a strong community
structure
is
developed and the norms of a community are altered
by
peer pressure
from
a cyclical
to
linear world view, hygiene behaviour change will
ensue and a
demand for
sanitation
can
be
created. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1954) is
adapted
to
a rural context
to
analyse
the
qualitative data, providing some insight into the
socio-cultural mechanisms
at
work.
Despite
adverse socio-economic conditions in Zimbabwe over
the
past
five
years,
Health
Clubs
have
flourished, providing a sustainable and cost-effective
case study
Measuring Access and Practice: Designing a Survey Methodology for the Hygiene, Sanitation and Water Sector
No full textAccess to safe water and sanitary means of excreta disposal are essential elements of
human development and poverty alleviation. It is estimated that one in four people in
the developing world lacks access to water while over half the population has no
access to sanitation. From the Alma-Ata declaration in 1978 to the recent Millennium
Development Goals, efforts to improve this situation have been hampered by the lack
of meaningful indicators to measure hygiene, sanitation and water coverage and
establish progress towards the goals and targets set out by the international
community.
This thesis aims to determine if measuring prevalence of access to water~ sanitation
and the practice of hygienic behaviour in hous~hold surveys can be.improved. With
no indicators available in current international' laws and targets, various aspects of
access and practice were examined to design indicators for field-testing. By using
- existing data sets, the research established that there is a high geographic clustering of
the measures of interest, which results in large design effects (deff) and rates of
homogeneity (roh) in cluster surveys. Based on the calculated roh optimum numbers
ofcluster and sample size were calculated for the field trials. This requires
introducing survey costs in the sample size calculations. The high clustering of water
and sanitation indicator require large sample sizes, resulting in large amounts of data
which organisations in the four field trials in Kosovo, South Africa, Kenya and Laos
found difficult to handle. Practical problems in the implementation of the survey
method resulted in non-sampling errors and could cause reluctance in adoption the
methodology. The research improved water and sanitation indicators but found that
for individual behaviour such as hygiene the household is not a suitable sampling unit.
It also showed that observation among interviewers have to be better standardised to
reduce the inter-surveyor.variation. Representative sampling is the current bottleneck
in the development of such a survey method. Current method requires a good
understanding of sampling theory as well as reliable sample frames, which are rarely
available to implementing organisations. Alternative sampling methods are
suggested, and recommendations are made for the further development ofthe survey
method designed in this research, which to date may be too complex for widespread
use
- …
