SODIS can help prevent waterborne diseases like typhoid, diohreea

SODIS can help prevent waterborne diseases like typhoid, diohreea etc, that are prevalent in Pakistan due to unsafe drinking water’, said Shaukat Farooq of SHELADIA Associates at a seminar on ‘Importance of Household Water Treatment’ organized by SDPI, at University of Arid Agriculture, Islamabad here on Tuesday.

Dr. Abdul Saboor, Head Department of Agricultural Economics, conducted the proceedings. Dr. Shaukat Farooq of SHELADIA Associates, Mome Saleem of SDPI and Dr. Safdar Ahmed, Dean Faculty of Sciences were also among the speakers of the seminar.

Mome Saleem gave a brief introduction on SDPI activities. Talking about the Household Treatment Methods, he said that SODIS is one of the most cost-effective methods and poor health especially among children. She said that apparently clean water is not necessarily safe for drinking purposes. Approximately 1.1 billion people around the world lack any access to drinking water and an additional 3.28 lack access to safe drinking water. The resultant diarrhea causes 35% of child deaths in the developing world and contributes to under nutrition by causing the loss of nutrients through stool loss and vomiting.

She said that four broad categories of HWTs storage and treatment include safe storage, disinfection, particle removal technologies and combined systems. She introduced the method of treatment of water and discussed its pros and cons. She told the audience that SODIS in Pakistan has been promoted and introduced by EWAG, Swiss Institute of science and technology in 2002; afterwards it was taken up by Swiss agency for development and cooperation (SDC).

Two Pilot projects in two areas Hyderabad and Faisalabad in collaboration with a local NGO, CAP with the help of frontline workers (LHWs) in Ministry of Health have been running successfully. She suggested that communication channels should be selected based on existing access to beneficiaries, costs and potential impacts such as print and electronic media and it was recommended that there needs to be offered a range of HWT technologies from which beneficiaries can select and help, increases adoption by empowering users and better conforms to local resources/conditions, prevailing beliefs & cultural practices.

Dr. Shaukat talking about certain HWTs said that once the water has been delivered and treated within the household, that re-contamination of the water does not occur in water. He said that in case of floods and other disasters generally, in remote areas of Pakistan especially, there is acute problem of clean & safe drinking water and usually the water there gets very turbid for the purposes of drinking. He further suggested that after the application of this filter, SODIS can be applied; the solar disinfection system has been tested with bore water, well as well as waste water. He pointed out that in 5 hours, the unit eradicated 3 log 10 (99.99%) of bacteria contained in the water samples and the unit will provide about 6 liters of pure drinking water and larger units can be fabricated for providing safe drinking water at community level in developing countries. He said that the government has not been able to provide hygienic water to more than 70% of population of the country hence SODIS can be an option to prevent the waterborne diseases to a considerable extent. He shared field research data and showed the promising results of SODIS on decreasing the amount of ecoli and other disease causing bacteria.

During the course of discussion there were raised a number of questions about whether the SODIS method of HWT can effectively remove microbial pollutants and what may be the consequences of using plastic bottles. It was explained that SODIS if cannot purify the water to complete extent but it could manage to reduce the amount of micro-organisms to certain levels, hence it is very usable and accessible for those people who live in the remote areas of Pakistan and who do not have ample resources to go for other options such as boiling or using tablets to purify water, as they would not be easily available to them. Certain other concerns regarding the use of plastic bottles and the carsogenic elements being released by them in water also came into question, but it was proved that plastic bottles do not release the carsogenic materials into water unless the temperature gets above 80 degree celcius.