Put simply, Jackie Knee wants to make people healthier. She’s worked at that singular goal in rural Thailand as a Fulbright Fellow, in the United States at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and at Georgia Tech as a fifth-year Ph.D. student in environmental engineering. Once she finishes her degree later this year, she’ll continue it in Britain as the 2019 Marshall Sherfield Fellow.
When Joe Brown went to India last summer, he was hoping to collect samples that could help answer some questions he’d been thinking about for a while. His years studying sanitation and global health had given him the idea that the open sewers and overflowing latrines common in the dense cities of the developing world could be linked with disease through an unusual mechanism: airborne transmission of pathogens.
Undergraduates Samantha Becker and Shannon Evanchec have helped build a better cup — one that’s designed to reduce the risk of diarrheal diseases in rural communities. Now they’ll compete with five other teams for the InVenture Prize next month.
Does providing some sort of improved latrine for children in developing countries actually improve their health? The obvious answer would seem to be “yes.” But the truth is, we don’t have the hard science to prove it.
For the global community to make universal access to sanitation services a reality in the next 15 years, Eddy Perez says we’ll have to flip our traditional approach.
Master’s student Aaron Bivins spent part of his summer traveling to Mozambique to help lay the groundwork for a study about the relationship between population density and the health effects of sanitation. This is part of an ongoing series of essays from across the globe written by CEE students who have traveled abroad with the support of the Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Endowment.
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