139
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Estimating the burden of disease from water, sanitation, and hygiene at a global level.

      research-article

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          We estimated the disease burden from water, sanitation, and hygiene at the global level taking into account various disease outcomes, principally diarrheal diseases. The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) combines the burden from death and disability in a single index and permits the comparison of the burden from water, sanitation, and hygiene with the burden from other risk factors or diseases. We divided the world's population into typical exposure scenarios for 14 geographical regions. We then matched these scenarios with relative risk information obtained mainly from intervention studies. We estimated the disease burden from water, sanitation, and hygiene to be 4.0% of all deaths and 5.7% of the total disease burden (in DALYs) occurring worldwide, taking into account diarrheal diseases, schistosomiasis, trachoma, ascariasis, trichuriasis, and hookworm disease. Because we based these estimates mainly on intervention studies, this burden is largely preventable. Other water- and sanitation-related diseases remain to be evaluated. This preliminary estimation of the global disease burden caused by water, sanitation, and hygiene provides a basic model that could be further refined for national or regional assessments. This significant and avoidable burden suggests that it should be a priority for public health policy.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Environ Health Perspect
          Environmental Health Perspectives
          0091-6765
          May 2002
          : 110
          : 5
          : 537-542
          Affiliations
          World Health Organization, Protection of the Human Environment, Geneva, Switzerland. pruessa@who.int
          Article
          sc271_5_1835
          10.1289/ehp.110-1240845
          1240845
          12003760
          05f82750-b978-45f2-ab29-02b7ac679a22
          History
          Categories
          Research Article

          Public health
          Public health

          Comments

          Comment on this article