WSUP – The MAPSAN Trial: A Controlled Before and After Study of Shared Sanitation in Maputo, 2015.
This major study, funded by USAID, is being led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). The research is looking at a number of related questions: will this communal toilet intervention have an effect on health, and more specifically, will any effects be dependent on population density? (We would expect the positive effect on health to be stronger in areas with higher population density)
It’s a fascinating and innovative study in many respects, not least because of the wide range of health metrics being measured: not just self-reported diarrhoea incidence (the common measure, widely suspected to be unreliable), but also a bunch of other metrics including child height and weight, parasites in child stools, and biochemical markers of viral and parasite infection. Plus at the same time other researchers will be applying the Gates-supported SaniPath approach to get a measure of degree of faecal contamination of the local environment.
