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Article
The Impact of Shared Sanitation Facilities On Diarrheal Diseases With and Without an Environmental Reservoir: A Modeling Study
Journal of Pathogens and Global Health
  • Matthew R. Just, Georgia Southern University
  • Stephen W. Carden, Georgia Southern University
  • Sheng Li, City University of New York
  • Kelly K. Baker, University of Iowa
  • Manoj Gambhir, Monash University
  • Isaac Fung, Georgia Southern University, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-6-2018
DOI
10.1080/20477724.2018.1478927
Abstract

Epidemiological studies have identified an increased risk of diarrheal diseases associated with using shared sanitation facilities. We hypothesized that this might be related to differences in transmission routes of pathogens. We proposed a mathematical model of two fictitious pathogens, one transmitted with an environmental reservoir and one without. We assumed that individuals susceptible to one pathogen are not susceptible to the other, and therefore, decoupled the two models. We initialized the model with 99% individuals being susceptible. We sampled the parameter space using Latin Hypercube Sampling. We simulated 10,000 parameter sets. We varied the effective shared sanitation coverage (the product of latrine coverage and users’ compliance). Our results show that, in our hypothetical scenario, across all levels of effective coverage of shared sanitation, the median final cumulative incidence of diarrheal disease was higher than that of zero coverage. Our simulation findings suggest that increasing effective coverage of shared sanitation may have limited benefits against diarrhea-causing pathogens with an environmental reservoir and may lack benefit against diarrhea-causing pathogens without an environmental reservoir given increased human contacts if latrines are poorly maintained.

Citation Information
Matthew R. Just, Stephen W. Carden, Sheng Li, Kelly K. Baker, et al.. "The Impact of Shared Sanitation Facilities On Diarrheal Diseases With and Without an Environmental Reservoir: A Modeling Study" Journal of Pathogens and Global Health Vol. 112 Iss. 4 (2018) p. 195 - 202
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/isaac_fung1/150/