environmental hazards caused by living conditions and human behaviour in residential areas are types of manmade hazards which have rarely been studied and documented in literature. available studies that had considered theconventional residential environment had proved that residents’ perception were influenced by human and environmental factors. with focus on educational institutions, this pap...

Environmental hazards caused by living conditions and human behaviour in residential areas are types of manmade hazards which have rarely been studied and documented in literature. Available studies that had considered theconventional residential environment had proved that residents’ perception were influenced by human and environmental factors. With focus on educational institutions, this pap...

BACKGROUND Shared facilities are not recognised as improved sanitation due to challenges of maintenance as they easily can be avenues for the spread of diseases. Thus there is need to evaluate the quality of shared facilities, especially in informal settlements, where they are commonly used. A shared facility can be equated to a common good whose management depends on the users. If users do not...

Unless strategies are found to galvanise rural communities and create a demand for sanitation, we cannot achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of halving the 2.4 billion people without sanitation by the year 2015. This study describes an innovative methodology used in Zimbabwe--Community Health Clubs--which significantly changed hygiene behaviour and built rural demand for sani...

BACKGROUND Poor school sanitation and hygiene is a major problem in developing countries and remains high risk behaviour among primary school going children. Many outbreaks of gastrointestinal infections have been associated with primary schools. This research paper was designed to assess the factors influencing hygiene behaviour among school children. METHODS A cross sectional study was cond...

provide some form of subsidy to individual families to reduce the cost of building a toilet. This approach is based on the assumption that both the construction and use of toilets depend on private decisions and on hygiene behaviour at the household level. However, this approach normally results in small, stepby-step changes in sanitation coverage, with further improvements becoming steadily mo...

Many bird parasites reduce their hosts’ fitness and, as a consequence, anti-parasite behaviour such as preening and nest sanitation has evolved. These activities are time consuming and, during the day, compete directly with time devoted to foraging and food provisioning to nestlings. Moreover, infested hosts may have to allocate extra time to foraging in order to compensate for the energy loss ...

To prevent diseases associated with inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene, people needing latrines and behavioural interventions must be identified. We compared two indicators that could be used to identify those people. Indicator 1 of household latrine coverage was a simple Yes/No response to the question "Does your household have a latrine?" Indicator 2 was more comprehensive, combining ques...

BACKGROUND Handwashing is a cost-effective way of preventing communicable diseases such as respiratory and food-borne illnesses. However, handwashing rates are low in developing countries. Target 7C of the seventh Millennium Development Goals was to increase by half the proportion of people with sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Studies have found that bett...

Many studies have demonstrated that improvements in infrastructure have been effective in reducing inequalities due to poverty. The Brazilian Government has invested a significant amount of resources to improve access to sanitation facilities in the municipalities in Brazil in the last decade. One of these programmes is the Bahia Azul programme of sanitation, which aimed to supply sanitation fo...