Feature Article

Although widely accepted as being one of the most important public health advances of the past hundred years, the contribution that improving sanitation coverage can make to child health is still unclear, especially since the publication of two large studies of sanitation in India which found no effect on child morbidity. We hypothesis that the value of sanitation does not come directly from use of improved sanitation but from improving community coverage.

Environmental phenomena are often observed first, and then explained quantitatively. The complexity of processes, the range of scales involved, and the lack of first principles make it challenging to predict conditions beyond the ones observed.

Landslide is one of the most ravaging natural disaster in the world and recent occurrences in Nigeria require urgent need for landslide risk assessment. A total of nine samples representing three major landslide prone areas in Nigeria were studied, with a view of determining their liquefaction and sliding potential. Geotechnical analysis was used to investigate the liquefaction potential, while the slope conditions were deduced using SLOPE/W. The results of geotechnical analysis revealed that the soils contain 6–34 % clay and 72–90 % sand.

Detailed spatial understanding of levels and trends in under-5 mortality is needed to improve the targeting of interventions to the areas of highest need, and to understand the sources of variation in mortality. To improve this understanding, we analysed local-level information on child mortality across sub-Saharan Africa between 1980–2010.

Open Source

Evolution persistently undermines vector control programs through insecticide resistance. Here we propose a novel strategy which instead exploits evolution to generate and sustain new control tools. Effective spatial repellents are needed to keep vectors out of houses. Our approach generates such new repellents by combining a high-toxicity insecticide with a candidate repellent initially effective against only part of the vector population.

Original Source

The 13th century CE Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha, India, is believed to have been built at the mouth of an ancient river named Chandrabhaga. This mythical river figures prominently in ancient literature, although at present no river exists in the proximity of the Konark Sun Temple. This study investigates the possibility of existence of a ‘lost’ river system near Konark through integrated geological and geophysical exploration in conjunction with historical evidence.

The present study was conducted in 2009–10 with the objective to monitor the effect of restorative soil management practices on biological soil quality. The experiment was initiated in 1995 in a strip–split–split plot design with three replications. Sorghum and castor were grown in two-year rotations.

Original Source

Inorganic soil arsenic (As) in three soils was fractionated adopting phosphorus fractionation schemes. Among these fractions, iron-bound arsenic (Fe-As) was found highest, followed by aluminium-bound arsenic (Al-As). The freely exchangeable arsenic was relatively small compared to the arsenic held by internal surfaces of soil aggregates. The arsenic fractions exhibited positive correlation with phosphorus content presumably due to the fact that high P in soil releases more arsenic from soil adsorption sites owing to the competition for the same adsorption sites.

India has 23% of the global burden of active tuberculosis (TB) patients and 27% of the world’s “missing” patients, which includes those who may not have received effective TB care and could potentially spread TB to others. The “cascade of care” is a useful model for visualizing deficiencies in case detection and retention in care, in order to prioritize interventions.

Original Source

Changes in the timings of seasonality as a result of anthropogenic climate change are predicted to occur over the coming decades. While this is expected to have widespread impacts on the dynamics of infectious disease through environmental forcing, empirical data are lacking. Here, we investigated whether seasonality, specifically the timing of spring ice-thaw, affected susceptibility to infection by the emerging pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) across a montane community of amphibians that are suffering declines and extirpations as a consequence of this infection.