A trial in urban Bangladesh tested an automatic water chlorination device, Aquatabs Flo, to reduce child diarrhoea. While effective, challenges arose: compatibility with only specific water systems, global lack of piped water access, varying intervention effects between neighborhoods, and 18% of sites rejecting the chlorinated water due to taste and smell concerns. The solution may not be universally applicable.
Additional Information
Faecal-pathogen-free living environments, food, and drinking water are irrefutably fundamental to human health. Nonetheless, several controlled experiments have failed to prove that WASH interventions, designed to reduce faecal exposure, improve health outcomes. These disappointing findings do not challenge the biological plausibility that water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services are essential to health, but do suggest that low-cost WASH interventions—those often available to rural dwellers in low-income countries—might not reduce the extremely high concentrations of contamination characteristic of impoverished living conditions to the very low concentrations of contamination required for health.