SaniPath is excited to announce that we have officially established a MoU with the School of Hygiene in Accra to develop a course for students and mid-level environmental health practitioners on the SaniPath Tool. Training of faculty at the School of Hygiene is planned for early 2021. This effort has been coordinated by our African training hub leads at TREND.
The WHO and UNICEF position paper Implications of recent WASH and nutrition studies for WASH policy and practice summarized three high-quality studies in the WASH sector that resulted in little or no impact on reducing childhood diarrhea and stunting. The paper aimed to contextualize the findings and distill the implications for future WASH investments.
The report highlighted that oftentimes fecal contamination of produce is not considered when designing and implementing interventions despite prior evidence that this is a dominant exposure pathway in many settings. The paper cites SaniPath as the source of this important piece of evidence.
The evidence generated through SaniPath's work is increasing awareness about this major exposure pathway and contributing to influential position papers such as this one. The data generated from deployments is encouraging policies and practices to address food safety issues that arise from fecal contamination along the value chain.
In September of 2019, SaniPath researchers participated in a workshop supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of exposure assessment researchers in the WASH sector. The objectives of the workshop were four-fold:
Identify criteria under which to compare various exposure assessment approaches
Discuss lessons in exposure science from other sectors of environmental health to explore potential application to enteric pathogen exposure assessments
Critically review existing and emerging enteric pathogen exposure assessment approaches
Determine and define research priorities to help move the field of enteric pathogen exposure science forward
The takeaways from the workshop are described in a publication by Goddard, et al. (2020). In the paper, the SaniPath Tool is cited as an example of an exposure assessment tool that measures the important interaction between environmental contamination and behavioral drivers.
