USAID, Procter & Gamble Highlight Partnership for Safe Drinking Water in Africa

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and consumer products conglomerate Procter and Gamble are highlighting their partnership to provide safe drinking water at the household level to millions of children in Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda.

"This partnership is a significant step to provide safe drinking water in Africa and elsewhere for millions of people," says Kent Hill, assistant administrator of USAID for global health. "This unique effort demonstrates the power ofpartnership by leveraging the skills and resources of Procter & Gamble and the U.S. government to reduce diarrheal disease, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 4,000 children per day around the globe."

This partnership focuses on provision of two proven, cost-effective, household-level technologies to disinfect drinking water. WaterGuard is a dilute bleach product developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), andPUR Purifier of Water is a powdered water treatment product developed by Procter & Gamble and CDC. These disinfection technologies have been shown to reduce disease and death in numerous health intervention trials.The technologies are now in the process of being promoted using social marketing and other approaches to raise awareness and change behavior in many African countries, the partner organizations say. They are also being used to provide safe drinkingwater for emergency relief, including the recent floods in Kenya and Ethiopia, and to help address cholera outbreaks in the Congo and Malawi.

"We have provided more than 600 million liters of safe drinking water over the last three years," says Charlotte Otto, global external relations officer at P&G. "Our efforts to date have been a drop in the ocean compared to the vast need, and this partnership enables us to scale-up our efforts in order to make a much larger health impact."

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Webcast: Nanotech To Improve Developing Nations

What if doctors in Kenya could equip cells of the retina with photo switches that can be flipped on,essentially making blind nerve cells see and restoring light sensitivity in people with degenerative blindness? What if public health workers in Bangladesh could place contaminated water into transparent bottles, which when placed in direct sunlight could disinfect the water and help prevent water-borne diseases like cholera, dysentery or polio?

What if a medical technician in Vietnam could use a tiny "reporter"molecule that attaches itself to specific bacteria or viruses in a patient sample and read with an inexpensive laser device -- no bigger than a briefcase -- whether an infectious disease is present? What if a nurse in Brazil could dispense a gel that would stick to the AIDS virus surface like molecular Velcro and prevent it from attacking healthy cells in sexually active women?

These scenarios are not science fiction. They are just a few examples of the exciting potential of nanomedicine -- an offshoot of nanotechnology which researchers in both industrialized and developing countries hail as enabling the next big breakthroughs in medicine and which promises to change virtually every facet of health care, disease control and prevention.

Nanotechnology is the engineering of machines and materials at the atomic scale.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington will hold a webcast on Tuesday, February 27 at 12 p.m. EST, with experts who will examine the role of nanotechnology to improve health in developing nations.

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