Hygiene Promotion - IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

elated to the opportunities that poor people (especially poor mothers) have to improvedomestic hygiene (Curtis et al., 2000). Diarrhoeas do not only cause disease and earlydeath in children. They also bring loss of food. This has a negative impact on children’snutritional status. Frequent diarrhoeas stunt children’s physical and intellectual growth.Figure 1. Effectiveness of Hardware and Hygiene Interventions in reducing DiarrheaMorbidity• Recent research also suggests that handwashing is an important preventive measurein the incidence of acute respiratory infections, the number one killer of children underfive. See for instance the study of Ryan et al. published in 2001.• There are other killer diseases directly and indirectly related to poor hygiene. The 1993IRC Publication Actions Speak (http://www.irc.nl/page/1836) lists 11 of them andshows how they are linked to various combinations of personal and domestic hygiene,safe water supplies and effective excreta disposal, wastewater disposal and drainage.Trachoma, for example, is the commonest cause of blindness from infections.Presently some 150 million people, mostly children are infected, with 11 millionestimated new cases of infection each year. WHO estimates that approximately 6million cases of blindness due to trachoma and 11 million cases of trachoma infectionoccur yearly. Prevalence of active disease in children varies from 10-40% in someAfrican countries to 3-10% in several Asian countries. The overall incidence isunknown (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/trachoma_t.html)• Evidence from health research shows that a lower incidence of trachoma is associatedwith fewer flies sitting on eyes and more frequent washing of children’s faces, alongwith improved excreta disposal and water supply (Emerson et al., 2000).8 Hygiene promotion