The world famous medical journal The Lancet has published the results of a two year health impact trial in Bangladesh. Less than 5% of studies submitted to this peer reviewed journal are published.
In this trial, the impact of using “Aquatabs Flo” at the inlet of a domestic tank water treatment system has been shown to reduce WHO-defined diarrhoea in children by over 25% compared to the control group (untreated water). Similar reductions were estimated for caregiver-defined diarrhoea.
The study also noted some other significant points:
– “Previous blinded trials of household water treatment interventions in low-income settings have failed to detect a reduction in child diarrhoea”.
– “Previous water intervention trials have focused on household- level water treatment, (the) findings show that a low-cost automatic point-of-collection (community-level) water treatment intervention can achieve high uptake and reduce diarrhoea in a densely populated setting”
– (The study) “detected significant improvements in stored household drinking water in the treatment group compared with the control group”
Overall, the study interpreted the results of this trial to mean that, “Passive chlorination at the point of collection could be an effective and scalable strategy in low-income urban settings for reducing child diarrhoea and for achieving global progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 to attain universal access to safe and affordable drinking water.”
