Children Ill After Drinking Water in Bihar School

The Friday incident took place at the government middle school in Runnisaidpur of Sitamarhi, a district police officer said.

The sick children were first admitted to a primary health centre (PHC) in Runnisaidpur and later over a dozen, who were critically ill, were shifted to the district hospital for treatment.

The children complained of pain in the stomach and started vomiting after drinking the water.

"It appears to be the handiwork of some anti-social elements as the handpump might have been poisoned," education department officials said.

After the news spread, hundreds of villagers thronged the PHC where the children had been admitted.

Expressing concern over the incidents, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said: "I am really worried as after the contaminated mid-day meal tragedy, now reports of poison in handpumps at schools are coming in from various places."

The chief minister added that state Director General of Police Abhayanand had been directed to initiate a probe into the incidents.

As many as 23 children lost their lives July 16 after consuming contaminated mid-day meal at the government primary school in Dahrmasati Gandawan village at Mashrakh block of Saran district, 60 km from Patna.

The mid-day meal scheme is running in 72,000 schools across the state with 1.60 crore students availing hot, freshly cooked meals.

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Access to Clean Water and Soap may Lead to Growth Improvements in Young Children

by Kathy Jones on? August 02, 2013 at 8:51 PM Child Health News Providing access to clean water and soap can lead to small, but significant, improvements in the growth of children under five years of age, according to a new study conducted by researchers at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and WaterAid that has been published in Cochrane.
Researchers identified 14 studies conducted in low and middle income countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Chile, Guatemala, Pakistan, Nepal, South Africa, Kenya and Cambodia) that provided data on the effect of water, sanitation and hygiene programmes on the physical growth of 9,469 children. The authors' analysis of the data suggested that interventions to improve the quality of the water in the household and provide soap resulted in an average 0.5cm increased height growth in children under the age of five.

Report lead author Dr Alan Dangour, a public health nutritionist from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: "We typically think that providing clean water, sanitation and hygiene is an effective way to reduce the incidence and associated deaths from diseases such as diarrhoea - which remains the third biggest killer of under fives worldwide. For the first time our analysis suggests that better access to these services may also have a small but important impact on the growth of young children.

"While there are some important shortcomings in the available evidence base, we estimate that clean drinking water and effective hand washing could reduce the prevalence of stunting in children under the age of five by up to 15%.1 This is potentially an extremely important finding, that identifies that improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene could be a key part of the tool kit to tackle the global burden of undernutrition."

Poor height growth, or stunting, affects 165 million children worldwide and results in long term impacts on physical and mental development, increasing the risk of mortality and reducing productivity in adulthood.2 Undernutrition is a cause of 3.1 million deaths annually - nearly half (45%) of all deaths in children under five.2

International development funding supports many nutritional interventions, such as the provision of vitamin supplements, that directly tackle poor nutrition outcomes, but this is the first study to show that interventions in water, sanitation and hygiene could also play a role in improving nutritional outcomes for children.

WaterAid chief executive Barbara Frost said: "As well as resulting in hundreds of thousands of under-five deaths every year, there is a growing consensus that unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene can affect the body's ability to absorb nutrients, impacting on child development and contributing to their stunting.

"Stunting continues to have serious consequences on the social and economic outcomes of developing countries. With only ?1.57 ($2.39) a year provided in aid for water and sanitation per person in sub-Saharan Africa - less than the price of a cup of coffee - we have to make access to these life critical necessities a higher priority."

The authors say that improving access to clean water and soap is likely to have led to the increase in height because of the reduction in microbiological and parasitic infestations in early childhood, which can negatively impact growth.

Professor Tim Wheeler, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development, which funded the research, said: "Failure to get the right nutrition in childhood can cause lifelong damage that cannot be undone. This report provides further support to the idea that using clean water and soap remains one of the best ways to prevent contracting diarrhoea and stopping young children losing the essential nutrients vital for them to grow."

Commenting on the research, Dr Francesco Branca, Director of Nutrition for Health and Development at the World Health Organization, who was not involved in the study, said: "Until now, we have not had a demonstration of the direct nutrition impact of WASH interventions on nutrition. This review shows that a multi-pronged approach is the way to go?bringing together actions to improve food quality and safety as well as feeding and care of children, with others to prevent and treat infections and improve the home environment?to address the scourge of chronic malnutrition."

The authors note there are limitations in the available data for analysis as the main findings of the review are based on relatively short-term studies (9-12 months in duration) and none of these studies is of high methodological quality. There are several large ongoing studies that my help improve the quality of the evidence base. The research was funded by the Department for International Development via the SHARE Research Consortium.

Source-Eurekalert

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Safe Drinking Water in Colombia Tackled By American Chemical Society Global Program

by Rukmani Krishna on? June 24, 2013 at 11:42 PM General Health News A white paper outlining possible solutions for increasing access to safe drinking water in the rural areas of the world was issued by the Global Innovation Imperatives (Gii) program, administered by the American Chemical Society (ACS) Office of International Activities. Although focused on the community of Chocont?, in Colombia, the suggested solutions have broader application.
Chocont? residents rely on rural aqueducts for their water, but supplies are vulnerable to pollution from nearby agriculture and largely go untreated. City officials asked ACS, the world's largest scientific society, to help solve the problem, noting that the solutions likely would apply to other areas of the country and possibly the world.

"The recommendations in this report should solve local problems but could be easily replicated elsewhere," said Francisco Gomez, assistant director of the ACS Office of International Activities. "If other areas in the region have this same problem, there is a good probability that the recommendations will offer solutions."

Gii's mission is to solve global challenges such as increasing access to safe drinking water and ensuring food security, Gomez explained. The approach involves bringing together experts within ACS, as well as other scientific societies and nongovernmental organizations, to share knowledge and expertise and propose innovative solutions ? essentially building a community around a problem.

To produce the Chocont? report, ACS partnered with the Colombian Society of Chemical Sciences (SOCOLQUIM), the Brazilian Chemical Society and the Latin American Federation of Chemical Associations, along with experts from the U.S. Geological Survey and Conservaci?n Internacional. The team conducted field visits to work toward the goal of providing clean water for all residents of the community.

The recommendations in the new report came out of discussions at the International Forum on Sustainable Conservation of Water Sources & Basins & Operation of Sidewalk Aqueducts of Chocont?, which was held in Bogot?, Colombia, in October 2012.

This is the second report issued by Gii. Its first white paper outlined recommendations for sustainable and cost-effective solutions to water quality challenges in India.

Gii's next forum, scheduled to take place later this year, will address water scarcity in a community in the south of Brazil. A white paper with recommendations will follow.

Source-Eurekalert

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Artificial Forest Created for Solar Water Splitting

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While "artificial leaf" is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an "artificial forest."

"Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts," explained Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, who led this research.

"To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest," he said.

Solar technologies are the ideal solutions for carbon-neutral renewable energy - there's enough energy in one hour's worth of global sunlight to meet all human needs for a year. Artificial photosynthesis, in which solar energy is directly converted into chemical fuels, is regarded as one of the most promising of solar technologies.

A major challenge for artificial photosynthesis is to produce hydrogen cheaply enough to compete with fossil fuels. Meeting this challenge requires an integrated system that can efficiently absorb sunlight and produce charge-carriers to drive separate water reduction and oxidation half-reactions.

"In natural photosynthesis the energy of absorbed sunlight produces energized charge-carriers that execute chemical reactions in separate regions of the chloroplast. We've integrated our nanowire nanoscale heterostructure into a functional system that mimics the integration in chloroplasts and provides a conceptual blueprint for better solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies in the future," Yang said.

When sunlight is absorbed by pigment molecules in a chloroplast, an energized electron is generated that moves from molecule to molecule through a transport chain until ultimately it drives the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbohydrate sugars. This electron transport chain is called a "Z-scheme" because the pattern of movement resembles the letter Z on its side.

Yang and his colleagues also use a Z-scheme in their system only they deploy two Earth abundant and stable semiconductors - silicon and titanium oxide - loaded with co-catalysts and with an ohmic contact inserted between them.

Silicon was used for the hydrogen-generating photocathode and titanium oxide for the oxygen-generating photoanode. The tree-like architecture was used to maximize the system's performance. Like trees in a real forest, the dense arrays of artificial nanowire trees suppress sunlight reflection and provide more surface area for fuel producing reactions.

"Upon illumination photo-excited electron-hole pairs are generated in silicon and titanium oxide, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum. The photo-generated electrons in the silicon nanowires migrate to the surface and reduce protons to generate hydrogen while the photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide nanowires oxidize water to evolve oxygen molecules. The majority charge carriers from both semiconductors recombine at the ohmic contact, completing the relay of the Z-scheme, similar to that of natural photosynthesis," Yang explained.

Arrays of tree-like nanowires consisting of Si trunks and TiO2 branches facilitate solar water-splitting in a fully integrated artificial photosynthesis system.

Under simulated sunlight, this integrated nanowire-based artificial photosynthesis system achieved a 0.12-percent solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency. Although comparable to some natural photosynthetic conversion efficiencies, this rate will have to be substantially improved for commercial use.

However, the modular design of this system allows for newly discovered individual components to be readily incorporated to improve its performance. For example, Yang noted that the photocurrent output from the system's silicon cathodes and titanium oxide anodes do not match, and that the lower photocurrent output from the anodes is limiting the system's overall performance.

A paper describing this research appeared in the journal NANO Letters.

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