Stephen P. Luby, Mahbubur Rahman, Benjamin F. Arnold, Leanne Unicomb et al.
BACKGROUND: Diarrhoea and growth faltering in early childhood are associated with subsequent adverse outcomes. We aimed to assess whether water quality, sanitation, and handwashing interventions alone or combined with nutrition interventions reduced diarrhoea or growth faltering. METHODS: The WASH B...
Amy J. Pickering, Clair Null, Peter J. Winch, Goldberg Mangwadu et al.
Child stunting is a global problem and is only modestly responsive to dietary interventions. Numerous observational studies have shown that water quality, sanitation, and handwashing (WASH) in a household are strongly associated with linear growth of children living in the same household. We have co...
Audrie Lin, Benjamin F. Arnold, Sadia Afreen, Rie Goto et al.
We assessed the relationship of fecal environmental contamination and environmental enteropathy. We compared markers of environmental enteropathy, parasite burden, and growth in 119 Bangladeshi children (≤ 48 months of age) across rural Bangladesh living in different levels of household environmenta...
Benjamin F. Arnold, Clair Null, Stephen P. Luby, Leanne Unicomb et al.
INTRODUCTION: Enteric infections are common during the first years of life in low-income countries and contribute to growth faltering with long-term impairment of health and development. Water quality, sanitation, handwashing and nutritional interventions can independently reduce enteric infections ...
Ayşe Ercümen, Amy J. Pickering, Laura H. Kwong, Benjamin F. Arnold et al.
in food (p < 0.05). E. coli in stored water and food increased with increasing E. coli in soil, ponds, source water and hands. We provide empirical evidence of fecal transmission in the domestic environment despite on-site sanitation. Animal feces contribute to fecal contamination, and fecal indicat...
Wolf‐Peter Schmidt, Benjamin F. Arnold, Sophie Boisson, Bernd Genser et al.
BACKGROUND: Diarrhoea remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality but is difficult to measure in epidemiological studies. Challenges include the diagnosis based on self-reported symptoms, the logistical burden of intensive surveillance and the variability of diarrhoea in space, time and perso...
Fahmida Tofail, Lia C. H. Fernald, Kishor Kumar Das, Mahbubur Rahman et al.
BACKGROUND: Poor nutrition and infectious diseases can prevent children from reaching their developmental potential. We aimed to assess the effects of improvements in water, sanitation, handwashing, and nutrition on early child development in rural Kenya. METHODS: In this cluster-randomised controll...
Andrew Mertens, Jade Benjamin‐Chung, John M. Colford, Jeremy Coyle et al.
. Interventions such as nutritional supplementation during pregnancy and the postnatal period could help prevent growth faltering, but programmatic action has been insufficient to eliminate the high burden of stunting and wasting in low- and middle-income countries. Identification of age windows and...
Jade Benjamin‐Chung, Andrew Mertens, John M. Colford, Alan Hubbard et al.
. Stunting, a form of linear growth faltering, increases the risk of illness, impaired cognitive development and mortality. Global stunting estimates rely on cross-sectional surveys, which cannot provide direct information about the timing of onset or persistence of growth faltering-a key considerat...
Ayşe Ercümen, Abu Mohd Naser, Leanne Unicomb, Benjamin F. Arnold et al.
BACKGROUND: Shallow tubewells are the primary drinking water source for most rural Bangladeshis. Fecal contamination has been detected in tubewells, at low concentrations at the source and at higher levels at the point of use. We conducted a randomized controlled trial to assess whether improving th...
Andrew Mertens, Jade Benjamin‐Chung, John M. Colford, Alan Hubbard et al.
. Prevailing methods to measure wasting rely on cross-sectional surveys that cannot measure onset, recovery and persistence-key features that inform preventive interventions and estimates of disease burden. Here we analyse 21 longitudinal cohorts and show that wasting is a highly dynamic process of ...
Amy J. Pickering, Ayşe Ercümen, Benjamin F. Arnold, Laura H. Kwong et al.
increase), while other pathways were not associated. In cross-sectional analysis, there were no associations between concurrently measured environmental contamination and diarrhea. Our findings suggest higher levels of E. coli on child hands are strongly associated with subsequent diarrheal illness ...
Stephen P. Luby, Amal Halder, Tarique Md. Nurul Huda, Leanne Unicomb et al.
We used a prospective, longitudinal cohort enrolled as part of a program evaluation to assess the relationship between drinking water microbiological quality and child diarrhea. We included 50 villages across rural Bangladesh. Within each village field-workers enrolled a systematic random sample of ...
Audrie Lin, Ayşe Ercümen, Jade Benjamin‐Chung, Benjamin F. Arnold et al.
Background: We evaluated effects of individual and combined water, sanitation, handwashing (WSH), and nutritional interventions on protozoan infections in children. Methods: We randomized geographical clusters of pregnant women in rural Bangladesh into chlorinated drinking water, hygienic sanitation...
Alexandria B. Boehm, Dan Wang, Ayşe Ercümen, Meghan Shea et al.
We evaluated whether provision and promotion of improved sanitation hardware (toilets and child feces management tools) reduced rotavirus and human fecal contamination of drinking water, child hands, and soil among rural Bangladeshi compounds enrolled in a cluster-randomized trial. We also measured ...