THE South Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) in collaboration with the Fiji School of Medicine (FSM) re-launched the Sanitation Park at the school yesterday. The Sanitation Park housed at FSM was developed to help address local sanitation and hygiene issues.
Fiji School of Medicine, Director Research Dr Graham Roberts said that as a community we would need to deal with our own health sanitation in particular our products and wastes. (…)
Categories: Campaigns and Events · East Asia & Pacific · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: Fiji, Fiji School of Medicine, school sanitation
A cholera epidemic sweeping across Guinea Bissau has now infected 1,077 people - three-quarters of them in the capital Bissau - and killed 25, leading experts to ask why lessons from previous epidemics have not been taken on board.
Cholera killed 400 people and infected 25,000 across the country in 2005. “We wrote reports and made many recommendations to the government after the 2005 cholera outbreak but none of them were ever implemented, and so we are left to start all over again,” said Augostino Betunda, joint director of services at the Bissau centre of epidemiology, which is charged with diagnosing the disease. (…)
Source: IRIN
Categories: Sanitary Facilities · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: Guinea-Bissau
Worried by the sanitary condition and manner its citizens openly deficate on the ground, Plateau State government yesterday announced that it has concluded arrangements to construct over one thousand public toilets across the state before the end of this year.
The Commissioner for Water Resources and Rural Development, Mallam Idi Waziri, made this disclosure at the state’s first lady, Mrs. Talatu Jang’s launching of the 2008 international year of sanitation held in Tabulung village in Kanke LGA.He noted that a healthy society and good sanitation will promote the economic growth of the state, hence the government decision to construct over 1,000 toilets across the state. (…)
Categories: Africa · Progress on Sanitation · Sanitary Facilities · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: Nigeria
NAIROBI, 29 July 2008 (IRIN) - Recurrent outbreaks of cholera in the western province of Nyanza are caused by widespread water contamination, including seepage from latrines, health officials said. 
“The major contributor to the recent outbreaks in the area was unsafe water,” Shahnaaz Sharif, the senior deputy director of medical services in Kenya’s health ministry, said. “In Kisumu, many wells are built near the latrine; eventually the sewage seeps into the wells.”
The high water table in the area was a contributing factor, Sharif said. Tests done on water samples from Kisumu and Nyando, two of the most affected districts in the province, indicated that 75 percent of sources were contaminated.
Categories: Africa · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: cholera, Kenya
Kitchen a haven for germs: Study
If you want to eat dinner from a clean surface, you might try your bathroom.
A study released Wednesday found that kitchen sinks have more germs than bathroom sinks. The study also found that three-quarters of kitchen cloths and sponges are heavily contaminated with harmful bacteria, meaning proper cleanup can be difficult.
The study was sponsored by the makers of the cleaning product Lysol, but the company did not design the study. Samples were taken by independent environmental scientists in 20 homes with children in each of seven regions, including the U.K., the U.S., Germany, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and India.
Categories: Africa · East Asia & Pacific · Europe & Central Asia · Hygiene Promotion · Middle East & North Africa · North America · Sanitation and Health · South Asia
Tagged: kitchen hygiene, kitchens
With malaria, diarrhea and vomiting, pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory infections, worm infestations, scabies, abscesses, sores, and boils all common ailments in the Kroo Bay community of the Sierra Leone capital Freetown local medical official Amadou Kandor says it’s little wonder 35 is an average life expectancy for the slum’s 6,000 inhabitants. Kroo Bay, one of the poorest areas in the centre of Sierra Leone’s beachfront capital Freetown, is a squalid slum so littered with rubbish that the paths are made of compressed plastic, cans and toothpaste tubes, and patches of bare orange earth are a rare sight.
Swarms of mosquitoes breed in pools of slimy green water, pigs and children play together in mounds of refuse. In one of the two rivers that flows past the densely packed tin and wood shelters, a bloated dead dog bobs on the surface just upstream of where people wash their clothes.
Categories: Africa · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: hygiene, life expectancy, Sierra Leone
SANTA ROSA, Texas — Along the Rio Grande, more than 400,000 mostly poor people live in ramshackle neighborhoods where sewage runs in open ditches. Although the U.S. Congress has set aside $300 million to improve sanitation, more than a quarter of that has gone unspent, a federal audit shows.
The need for better hygiene was obvious during a recent afternoon rainstorm, when brothers Angel and Salvador Badillo sat under a tin roof with a couple of friends, sipping beers as the open drainage ditch in front of their clapboard house filled like a moat.
Soon, neighbors’ septic tanks could begin to overflow, creating a smelly and potentially disease-ridden mess.
Categories: North America · Sanitary Facilities · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: Texas, United States of America, USA
Inadequate sanitation leads to eight deaths in the country every hour, topping the list of all causes of mortality, Health Minister, Major (rtd) Courage Quashigah, has disclosed.
He was speaking at the launch of the Sixth National Food Safety Week in Accra yesterday.
He said that the total number of yearly out-patient cases reported with food-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera and hepatitis, is about 420,000 with annual death rate of not less than 65,000.
The launch, on the theme: “Clean markets, safe food — a healthy people”, aimed at establishing a framework for the creation of food safety awareness among stakeholders such as the Ministry of Health, Food and Drugs Board (FDB), Ghana Standards Board (GSB), and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It also sought to demonstrate the way in which safe food delivery can be attained through activating the right partnerships between regulatory institutions, industry, academia and consumers.
The minister said poor hygiene is associated with these diseases adding, “Diarrhoea diseases from consumption of raw and rotten vegetables and fruits, meat and fish production and processing, including street foods, are usually closely linked to poor hygiene”.
Categories: Africa · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: food hygiene, food safety, Ghana
Service provision in sanitation and hygiene involves four main components that must be understood and addressed when designing or implementing a new sanitation project:
- institutions required to implement and sustain improved sanitation and hygiene at scale.
- infrastructure itself (the physical hardware of latrines and sewers);
- promotion of behavior change, both for hygiene, and for household investment in infrastructure; and
- finance required to pay for the infrastructure and promotion
This Sanitation, Hygiene and Wastewater Resource Guide describes sanitation problems and solutions through the above framework, and guides the reader to available resources on these topics.
Categories: Economic Benefits · Education & training · Multimedia · Publications · Sanitation and Health · Wastewater Management
Tagged: hygiene, resource guide, wastewater, World Bamnk
Effective and affordable interventions that provide the global population with access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation are needed if water-borne diseases are ever to be controlled.
This is the conclusion of a World Health Organization (WHO) report entitled ‘Safe Water, Better Health’, released in June.
The report provides for the first time country-by-country estimates of disease caused by poor water quality, sanitation and hygiene.
It finds that children, particularly in developing countries, suffer a disproportionate share of the disease burden caused by unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation.
The WHO estimates that almost ten per cent of the global disease burden is caused by unsafe water and sanitation and that the economic return of investing in improved access to safe drinking water was ten-fold.
The WHO’s findings echo a study by researchers from the University of Michigan, who published a paper on the challenges of achieving global sanitation coverage in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
Categories: Publications · Sanitation and Health
Tagged: health impacts, water-borne diseases
