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IHE Delft joins global consortium to tackle the effect of climate change on diarrheal diseases

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IHE Delft joined today a global consortium led by Amsterdam University Medical Centre (Amsterdam UMC) to improve policies and interventions tasked with tackle diarrheal diseases in the face of climate change.

Worldwide, diarrhoea is the third largest cause of death for children up to five years old, contributing to more than 500,000 deaths annually. The progress made in recent decades to reduce diarrheal disease is under threat because of increased flooding and droughts driven by climate change.

The consortium, dubbed SPRINGS, has been awarded a € 6.5 million grant from the European Union to tackle this problem. A global and multi-disciplinary team will use broad-scale modelling and community-based case studies to identify which local interventions will be most effective in the future.

Global consortium

IHE Delft together with the Amsterdam Institute of Global Health and Development, the University of Ghana, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and many other universities and hospitals around the world are joining the global SPRINGS consortium led by Amsterdam UMC.

"We see that the impact of climate change on diseases transmission depends on the constantly changing interaction between climate events, local vulnerabilities and exposure to disease,” said Vanessa Harris, Assistant Professor of Global Health at Amsterdam UMC. "For example, sudden heavy rain can cause sewers to overflow and contaminate water supplies and increasing temperatures can cause some pathogens to live longer outside the body.”

Flooding risk hotspots

Shreedhar Maskey, IHE Delft Associate Professor of Hydrology & Water Resources, leads the IHE Delft engagement. His team will analyse flooding risk hotspots in the case-study areas in Ghana and Romania under current and future climate scenarios.

 “Understanding the changing risks of flood and drought hazards, in space and time, and their impacts on water systems in terms of quantity and quality is instrumental to design interventions for reducing diarrheal diseases and other water related health impacts,” he said. 

Bridging the knowledge gap

More knowledge is required to develop effective policies against diarrheal disease in countries hardest hit by climate change. The first goal of the consortium is to comprehend how climate change’s impact on water supplies and the environment affects the spread of diarrheal disease and which pathogens increase the risks. We achieve this by predicting local and national risks and use this evidence to shape policy, Harris said.

“This means understanding where water quality and pathogen surveillance needs to be performed to support communities and governments in prioritizing their limited resources across health and environmental sectors.  Ultimately, the combination of better mapping and more surveillance coupled with targeted interventions should reduce illnesses and deaths,” she said. 

Community-based studies

Adelina Mensah, an environmental scientist at the University of Ghana, has seen the effects of climate change on health first hand in multiple-community-based studies.

"Many of our fishing communities are exposed to frequent flooding events from storm surges and erratic heavy rainfall events, which sometimes occur at the same time and have devastating consequences on homes and water supplies. The quality of surface and groundwater is especially compromised through unknown pathways of disease transmission; and with limited alternative resources during these events, health risks to entire families are exponentially increased," she said.

Research will be carried out at case study sites in four countries: Ghana, Tanzania, Romania and Italy. Each has been selected because of its vulnerability to both flooding and drought. The unique characteristics of the sites will also add knowledge to the research project, for example, Naples, faces extra risks due to its aging urban water infrastructure and proximity to farming and agriculture. The extremely remote rural town of Haydom, Tanzania, has high rates of malnutrition and poverty coupled with increased exposure to food insecurity. The impacts of climate change are increasing diarrheal disease making cost-effective evidence-based adaptations and interventions essential.

The SPRINGS consortium comprises Amsterdam UMC, AIGHD, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the University of Virginia, the University of Ghana, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Three o'Clock, Aarhus University, the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Naples, the Haydom Lutheran Hospital, AQUATIM, the University of Bucharest and the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

SPRINGS  stands for Supporting Policy Regulations and Interventions to Negate aggravated Global diarrheal disease due to future climate Shocks.

Shreedhar Maskey

Associate Professor of Hydrology & Water Resources

Shreedhar Maskey

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