Sunlight Not the Solution for Clean Water -- New Study

An estimated 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases, mainly by drinking or coming into contact with dirty water. The majority of those nearly two million people are children under the age of five living in developing countries.

Household solar drinking water disinfection, or SODIS, is a simple, low-cost method that involves filling clear plastic bottles, such as old soda bottles, with water containing diarrhea-causing microbes and exposing them to direct sunlight for several hours.

Ultraviolet radiation from the sun and a temperature increase inside the bottles inactivate pathogens, making it safe to drink.

SODIS is currently promoted worldwide by various public health agencies and organizations.

The new study, which appears online this month in the journal PLoS Medicine, suggests that introducing SODIS into communities did not significantly reduce diarrhea rates in rural villages in Bolivia.

Until additional real-world studies of the effectiveness of SODIS are conducted, agencies should "hold off" on new promotion campaigns for the method, said study leader Daniel Mausezahl, a senior health advisor at the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel, Switzerland.

Clean Water Solutions

Mausezahl and colleagues found that children in families that used the SODIS method had on average 3.6 episodes of diarrhea per year, compared with 4.3 annual episodes in the control group.

The result is not statistically significant enough to show that the small reduction was due to the SODIS method, the authors say.

The problem is not SODIS, which undoubtedly works, Mausezahl said.

"SODIS is effective," he said। "If you are in dire straits, you can take a SODIS bottle and put river water in it, expose it to the sun for at least six hours, and you can drink it."

The authors note, for example, that while nearly 80 percent of the households reported diligent SODIS use, field-worker observations suggested that only about a third of them actually did so।

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