NEW DELHI: Home appliances maker Eureka Forbes has launched mobile water purifier ‘Aquaguard-on-the -Go’, priced at Rs 595. Aquaguard-on-the-Go is in shape of a sipper loaded with miniaturized water purification technology and would be available across retail outlets and general stores, Eureka Forbes said in a statement. It would be available in four variants – black mystery, pink beauty, pearl white and racy blue, Eureka Forbes, a part of ShapoorjiPallonji Group, said. Commenting on the development, Marzin R Shroff, Eureka Forbes CEO – Direct Sales and Senior VP, Marketing, said the miniaturised water purification technology was rolled out after seven years of research.
“Aquaguard-on-the-Go is perhaps the only water purifier in India which can enable affordability, adaptability and availability of safe drinking water for Indians. It is an important milestone in the history of brand Aquaguard which will take our market leadership in India to the next level,” he added.
The company said, the water purifier is powered by space nano technology, which has 100 crore plus optimally charged active sites that attract and can remove 99.
9 per cent harmful bacteria and virus. Water filled in sipper passes through a maze of nano sized positive charged media that traps negatively charged pathogens and other impurities to decontaminate drinking water, the company said. It would attract the travellers, school/college students, sports and fitness enthusiasts. Eureka Forbes, which had a turnover of Rs 1,776 crore last year, has a customer base of 15 million with presence in 450 cities and towns in India and a globally across 35 countries.
Local Literature
Water Stations in the Philippines
In the Philippines, bottled water has established a major foothold. In some places, piped-water systems are lacking; in others, people are uncertain about biological contaminants, disinfection by-products from the chlorination process, taste, and odor. Even in the capital Manila, only about three fourths of the population receives piped water from the municipal authority. Outside Manila far fewer people have access to clean water distribution. In both locations, these families must find alternate water sources if they are to avoid cholera epidemics and other health problems spawned by the foul, contaminated water available in their neighborhoods. A solution has appeared in the thousands of water refilling stations that now dot the Philippine landscape. These shops began as privately-run community sources, where consumers would bring containers and fill them for a per-gallon fee that is a small fraction of commercially bottled water’s cost.
Demand is such that most stores now offer home delivery for regular customers. Most shops produce between 3,000 and 12,000 liters of water per day. Typically, the supply comes from the pipes of municipal concessionaires. Entrepreneurs invest in treatment equipment and further purify their product before sale. Other shops are likely supplied by unauthorized or illegal deep well diggings. A proliferation of these private sources could have detrimental effects on groundwater reserves and subject them to contamination.
The government has accepted private water shops as a necessary weapon in the fight against waterborne disease and regulates their quality control practices and final product as much as possible. However, given the large number of shops, it is difficult to adequately monitor the entire industry. Though many in the Philippines benefit from the availability of water shops, the system does not address the long-term water delivery and sanitation infrastructure improvements necessary to provide reliable water to all. Source: http://www.drinking-water.org/html/en/Distribution/Water-Stores-and-Refilling-Stations-in-the-Philippines.html FOREIGN STUDY
Medical Missionaries Water Purification Project Study Design By Rita Baumgartner – January 2009
Project Title: Point-of-use Interventions for Safer Drinking Water in Thomassique, Haiti. Purpose of the Study: Increasing sustainable access to clean drinking water is an essential step in promoting health in developing countries. The World Bank’s Millennium Development Goals call for a 50% reduction in the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015 (MDG7, Target 10). Drinking water can be contaminated with disease-causing bacteria, parasites, and viruses at the source, within the delivery system, or during transport to homes for use. Each year, over 1.8 million people around the world die from diarrheal diseases and this burden of disease falls very highly on children under five years of age: over 90% of deaths from diarrhea are among children under five years old (Nath et al., 2006). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to 94% of diarrheal illness is preventable with interventions to increase availability of clean water and through improved sanitation and hygiene.
In 2006, a Cochrane review of randomized trials suggested that point-of-use (POU) water quality interventions are essential in reducing death and illness from diarrhea. Point-of-use water quality interventions are interventions that affect the quality of water from where it is accessed in the community as opposed to treatment at the source or changes to the infrastructure. Examples of POU interventions include large slow-sand filters at community water pumps, household filters, boiling water in the home, chlorine and other chemical disinfectants used in the home, and UV or sunlight treatment. POU interventions are also sometimes referred to as “household water treatment and safe storage interventions” or “HWTS.” POU interventions are ideal for improving water quality in developing countries because they are highly cost-effective, can be rapidly deployed and taken up by vulnerable populations, and are considered some of the most effective of water, sanitation and health interventions (WHO and UNICEF, 2006). Thomassique, Haiti, is a poor, rural community of approximately 60,000 people, located in the east of Haiti’s Central Plateau.
Thomassique’s major source of water is a spring located approximately 15 miles away in the town of Cerca-la-Source. The water delivery infrastructure was constructed in the 1980s and has had little repair since this time. Approximately 20% of Thomassique residents have water piped to their households. All other residents get water from public fountains (tiyo). Recent microbiological tests of the water from these fountains revealed high levels of bacterial contamination. This study is a pilot study to increase understanding of Thomassique residents’ current drinking water and sanitation practices and to learn what POU intervention is most effective in Thomassique. This study will increase knowledge in 5 areas: 1. Residents’ current drinking-water and sanitations practices 2. Residents’ opinions regarding the quality and accessibility of water in their community 3. Rates of diarrheal diseases among children under 5 years old and adults over 50 years old 4.
Residents’ willingness to invest in public and private POU interventions 5. Relative effectiveness of two different POU interventions among residents of Thomassique With this increased knowledge, a large-scale clean water project will be designed in order to extend positive outcomes to a greater portion of the Thomassique community. The pilot study is essential in the success of the final clean water project to have positive health impacts because the pilot study will demonstrate which technology is most relevant and acceptable to residents in Thomassique and what community education is needed to promote effective use. This study might further assist in designing clean water projects in other communities on the Central Plateau with similar disease burdens and cultural preferences as Thomassique.
Study Population: The participant population will be three groups of 20 households (60 households total) living in the northeastern zone of Thomassique. The three groups will be randomly assigned from within the 60 households. The person in the household to which the survey and educational information will be directed is the head woman of the household. This population was chosen for the study for three reasons. First, the northeast zone of Thomassique is remote from downtown Thomassique and will therefore most likely not benefit from any improvements in water supply infrastructure or water quality provided by the town in the near future. Second, the Medical Missionaries Fellows, who will be carrying out the pilot study, live at Saint Joseph Clinic, which is located in northeastern Thomassique. Therefore, if any participants have questions, comments, or problems, the Fellows will be easily accessible to them.
Finally, the head woman of each household was selected as the target for the survey and education because, since the women doing most of the childcare, food preparation, and cleaning, they will be most familiar with the precise water situation. Furthermore, because the women are the primary care providers, the mothers in the household will be able to pass on the information they learn regarding proper water treatment and sanitation to their children. Recruiting Participants: Participants will be recruited through personal contact by the Medical Missionaries Fellows, who are acquaintances of many people living in the northeastern zone of Thomassique due to their work at Saint Joseph Clinic, their other community outreach efforts, and the fact that they are easily identifiable as the only foreigners in Thomassique. The Fellows will go to the homes of people living in the area and ask them if they would be willing to be included in the study. (See Appendix A for the interview protocol. Note: All materials will be translated into Creole.)
This method of recruitment is preferable because many of the residents of this zone are not literate and thus any written advertisements or flyers would not reach much of the target population. The Fellows will go to people’s homes in the late afternoon, between 3:30 pm and 6 pm. At this time, the afternoon meal will have already been prepared and any family members who were working in the fields or doing other tasks will have returned. This is the time we will most likely be able to find the head woman of the household at home and relatively unoccupied. Study Activities: After a resident has agreed to participate in the research, she will be led through an oral informed consent process and asked to sign an informed consent form and a photo consent form. (See Appendices B and D.)
The next step of the pilot study is a pre-intervention oral questionnaire designed to gain information regarding residents’ current drinking-water and sanitations practices, residents’ opinions regarding the quality and accessibility of water in their community, rates of diarrheal diseases among children under 5 years old and adults over 50 years old in each household and residents’ willingness to invest in public and private POU interventions. (See Appendix E.) This questionnaire is partially based on “Core questions on drinking water and sanitation for household surveys” (WHO and UNICEF, 2006). The questionnaire will be the same for all three study groups. For each child under 5 years of age who is reported to have had diarrhea in the past two weeks, the researcher will asses the severity of each child’s dehydration based on the clinical classification of severity of dehydration taken from “Lecture Notes on Tropical Medicine,” edited by G. Gill and N. Beeching (2007).
This system classifies individuals into three groups: mild, moderate, and severe dehydration. Please see Appendix I for a description of the classification system. Such classification is important to ensure that any children with severe dehydration receive medical attention. Children determined to have moderate dehydration will be given oral rehydration solution and their parents informed as to warning signs that the child is becoming dangerously dehydrated. Children with severe dehydration will be given oral rehydration solution and referred immediately to the clinic. Classification into these three groups will also lead to more consistent comparisons between severity of diarrhea pre- and post- intervention.
The next step of the study is a short education session, which will occur approximately 2 weeks after the initial administration of the questionnaire. (See Appendix F.) The Fellows will give a presentation on basic causes of diarrheal disease, safe stool disposal, hand washing, approaches to improve household drinking-water quality and how a household can benefit from improved drinking-water quality and sanitation. The presentation will be oral and will contain some pictures to aid in comprehension. (See Appendix G.)
This presentation will last approximately 15 minutes. All three groups in the study will see the same initial 15-minute presentation. After the general presentation, each study group will receive a different additional 5-minute presentation focused on the intervention specific for that group. The three focus presentations will address: 1. General review of all other information covered in original session (control) 2. Use of chlorine to treat drinking-water
3. Use of solar disinfection to treat drinking water. (Participants in group 1 will not receive any additional study materials.) Participants in group 2 will be provisioned with a “Klorfasil” system (a bucket with a tap and enough chlorine to treat 5 gallons of water each day for 18 months). This system is currently being introduced in Hinche, a city approximately 20 miles away. These participants will be asked to attend a distribution session run by the Klorfasil representative from Hinche. She is Haitian and will give a detailed presentation about correct use of the system. Participants in group 3 will be given two 16.9 ounce bottles made of clear PET plastic for each member of the family.
These two specific interventions were selected based on their potential to cause immediate, low-cost impact on the quality of drinking water available in the outlying areas of Thomassique. They would both be very feasible to extend to a large number of people very quickly. The population targeted in this study is large, spread over a wide geographical range, and very poor. Therefore, many of them are unlikely to experience major changes in infrastructure or access in the near future. These two interventions would allow many people very immediate access to clean drinking water at very low cost.
The Klorfasil treatment system has recently been introduced in some parts of Hinche and has been reported as being successful. The chlorination program in Hinche would be relatively easy to extend to Thomassique. For solar treatment, the only necessary material is clear plastic bottles, which are widely available in Thomassique. Other options may be better longer term but before we invest in a large amount of money in household filters, community filters, bigger infrastructure projects, etc, we want to ensure we know how people feel about these, so we will ask people about their willingness to invest in such interventions. The next step of the study is a short post-intervention oral questionnaire. (See Appendix H.) This questionnaire will be administered 3 separate times in each household: 2 weeks following the education session, 1 month after the education session, and 2 months after the education session.
The post-intervention questionnaire contains only 7 questions and should not take more than 10 minutes of participants’ time to complete. The questionnaire will be administered three times in each household in order to demonstrate whether the interventions are effective in changing people’s behavior over time and not just immediately following the education session. We are interested in developing a safe drinking-water culture that lasts well beyond the duration of the study and thus we want to know how adherence to the intervention changes over time. Benefits to the Participants: Participants will receive education and, in groups 2 and 3, materials that will enable them to improve the quality of drinking water and sanitation in their households. By improving drinking water and sanitation, the participating households will most likely decrease their burden of diarrheal disease and increase health among all members of the household.
Indirect Benefits: We will gain better understanding of current sanitation practices, information on residents’ resources, knowledge, and options to influence home hygiene. The knowledge gained from this study will be used to inform further safe drinking-water projects in Thomassique. For example, if one intervention shows more improved health outcomes than the others, future projects will extend this intervention to more residents of Thomassique.
Also, the information gained regarding residents’ willingness to invest in public and private POU interventions will ensure that no future projects are undertaken without community dedication to maintenance and sustainability. Finally, following this study, a presentation will be given to members of the Thomassique Water Committee, who are responsible for upkeep and development of the current water delivery system. They are interested in including education among their future activities and this study will help them design their education program to be most effective in Thomassique.
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