Today, diarrhea remains the world’s second leading cause of death and is the leading cause of malnutrition and stunting in children under five. Many cases of diarrhea in developing countries can be prevented through access to sanitation and water. In fact, water, sanitation, and hygiene reduce diarrhea risk by an estimated 30%. When Kamal Kar published his first paper on Community-Led Total San...

OBJECTIVE Initiatives to monitor progress in health interventions like sanitation are increasingly focused on disparities in access. We explored three methodological challenges to monitoring changes in sanitation coverage across socio-economic and demographic determinants: (i) confounding by wealth indices including water and sanitation assets, (ii) use of individual urban and rural settings ve...

About 3ie The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) works to improve the lives of people in the developing world by supporting the production and use of evidence on what works, when, why and for how much. 3ie is a new initiative that responds to demands for better evidence, and will enhance development effectiveness by promoting better informed policies. 3ie finances high-quality...

BACKGROUND Accessible improved sanitation is critical to child health, and inequities in improved sanitation can be interpreted as health inequities across socio-economic groups. From 2009 to 2011, the Chinese government invested 4.448 billion yuan for rural sanitation improvement through a 3-year health reform program. This study assesses the inequity of sanitation improvement in rural China f...

Recent large epidemics of cholera with high incidence and associated mortality among refugees have raised the question of whether oral cholera vaccines should be considered as an additional preventive measure in high-risk populations. The potential impact of oral cholera vaccines on populations prone to seasonal endemic cholera has also been questioned. This article reviews the potential cost-e...

Many studies have reported the results of interventions to reduce illness through improvements in drinking water, sanitation facilities, and hygiene practices in less developed countries. There has, however, been no formal systematic review and meta-analysis comparing the evidence of the relative effectiveness of these interventions. We developed a comprehensive search strategy designed to iden...

BACKGROUND Improved sanitation has been shown to have great impacts on people's health and economy. However, the progress of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015 has thus far been delayed. One of the reasons for the slow progress is that policy makers, as well as the general public, have ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effectiveness of a sanitation campaign that combines 'shaming' (i.e. emotional motivators) with subsidies for poor households in rural Orissa, an Indian state with a disproportionately high share of India's child mortality. METHODS Using a cluster-randomized design, we selected 20 treatment and 20 control villages in the coastal district of Bhadrak, rural Orissa, fo...

The administration of Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan Province, China, is in the process of considering a range of upgrades to their sanitation and wastewater treatment systems. Their case history involves an ongoing series of engineering design flaws and management failures. The administration of the Park identified sustainability, environmental protection, and education goals for their sa...

To the World Health Organization malaria remains "one of the world's most important public health concerns". During the post-eradication era of the 1980s there was no clear answer to the following question: what kind of intervention could be effective against malaria in the 'roll-back malaria' programme? In this situation there were also calls for an 'applied history of medicine', since the ant...