Original title: Burden of disease from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene for selected adverse health outcomes: An updated analysis with a focus on low- and middle-income countries
The researchers estimated how much illness and death in 2016 could be linked to inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene. They combined information about people’s exposure with evidence about how each exposure relates to disease. They estimated deaths and years of healthy life lost for several diseases, including diarrhoea and malaria. They linked inadequate WASH to 829,000 diarrhoeal deaths, including 297,000 among children under five.
Imagine sorting a pile of household bills to work out which ones came from leaving the lights on. Some bills are clearly connected, while others have several possible causes. In this paper, the bills are cases of illness and death, and the researchers estimate what share is linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene by combining exposure information with evidence about disease risk.
Unsafe water and poor sanitation affect people’s health, with young children especially at risk. These estimates help show how much disease is linked to inadequate WASH and support global tracking of deaths from these conditions.
The estimates cover selected diseases and exposure patterns with sufficient global exposure data and matching exposure-response evidence for 2016. They depend on uncertainty in exposure estimates and relative risks. The abstract does not establish that inadequate WASH caused every illness counted or describe the effects of particular interventions.
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Burden of disease from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene for selected adverse health outcomes: An updated analysis with a focus on low- and middle-income countries — Annette Prüss‐Üstün, Jennyfer Wolf, Jamie Bartram et al. — International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health — doi:10.1016/j.ijheh.2019.05.004
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.