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Chlorinating household water in The Gambia

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conference contribution
posted on 2018-02-12, 15:07 authored by Christopher J. Austin
This study investigated the feasibility of providing safe drinking and cooking water by in-home chlorination of household water jars (HWJ). Open well water quality was measured in the dry and rainy season and found acceptable for chlorination. Rural village women were taught to dose their HWJs with a diluted household bleach solution to give an organoleptically acceptable dose of 2.0 mg/L chlo­rine. This dose eliminated fecal coliforms within 30 min­utes and protected stored water for 24 hours. A 22 village double blind randomized intervention trial was carried out over a rainy season. No effect of HWJ chlorination on the incidence of diarrhea was detected. A trend was revealed that for children 6-24 months, villages which chlorinated the HWJs did not suffer a significant decrease in the village mean weight-for-height Z-score as compared to control villages (p =.1170). In children 6-24 months and also 25-60 months, the control group suffered a significant increase in the proportion of malnourished children (p=.0002); where­as the intervention group did not experience a significant increase (p=. I 000). The study concluded that women chlorinating their HWJs may be an appropriate avenue of providing safe drinking and cooking water in rural commu­nities.

Funding

This study was carried out in partial fulfilment of the Doctor of Science degree and was supported by funds from the International Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Research Unit

  • Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)

Published in

WEDC Conference

Citation

AUSTIN, C.J., 1993. Chlorinating household water in The Gambia. IN: Pickford, J. et al. (eds). Water, sanitation, environment and development: Proceedings of the 19th WEDC International Conference, Accra, Ghana, 6-10 September 1993, pp.90-92.

Publisher

© WEDC, Loughborough University

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

1993

Notes

This is a conference paper.

Other identifier

WEDC_ID:10393

Language

  • en

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    WEDC 19th International Conference

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