A Novel Approach to Making Drinking Water Safe in Western Kenya
Sam Dorevitch, MD, MHP – UIC School of Public Health

In low-income countries, an estimated 1.7 billion cases of acute diarrhea occur among children under 5 years of age, resulting in approximately 711,000 deaths, half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Recurrent and chronic diarrhea in children are a major cause of “stunting,” the impaired physical and cognitive development of malnourished children. Inadequate water and sanitation account for half of the deaths from diarrhea among children in Sub-Saharan Africa. A major challenge in preventing death and chronic morbidity in children is the lack of centralized water and sanitation treatment facilities in rural areas of low-income nations. Point of use (PoU) treatment of household stored water has been a promoted as a means of improving drinking water quality. The addition of chlorine to stored water – the main PoU approach – does reduce concentrations of E. coli in stored water; under ‘real-life’ conditions, chlorination is difficult to maintain due to the taste, ongoing cost, and need for a reliable supply chain for chlorine. A novel, solar-powered approach to PoU water treatment was tested by a group at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and at the Safe Water and AIDS Project (SWAP) in Kisumu, Kenya. Using electricity generated by a low-cost solar panel, oxygen in ambient air (O2) is converted to ozone (O3) and the ozone – a water treatment method approved by the US EPA – is bubbled through stored drinking water. In order to determine whether this PoU approach will reduce rates of childhood diarrhea and stunting, a large-scale, multi-year, multi-million dollar study is needed. Before a study of that scale can be considered, a smaller scale assessment of the solar powered PoU method and diarrhea incidence was carried out to evaluate whether diarrhea occurrence among children in Western Kenya is a function of water quality and/or PoU solar-powered ozonation.