Impact of community piped water coverage on re-infection with urogenital schistosomiasis in rural South Africa
- African Health Research Institute, South Africa
- University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
- University of Cincinnati, United States
Abstract
Previously, we demonstrated that high coverage of piped water in the seven years preceding a parasitological survey was strongly predictive of Schistosomiasis haematobium infection in a nested cohort of 1,976 primary school children [1]. Here, we report on the prospective follow up of infected members of this nested cohort (N=333) for two successive rounds following treatment. Using a negative binomial regression fitted to egg count data, we found that every percentage point increase in piped water coverage was associated with 4.4% decline in intensity of re-infection (incidence rate ratio = 0.96, 95%CI: 0.93-0.98, P= 0.002) among the treated children. We therefore provide further compelling evidence in support of the scaleup of piped water as an effective control strategy against Schistosomiasis haematobium transmission.
Data availability
Data that support the findings presented in this manuscript are available from the African Health Research data repository upon request and agreeing to AHRI's terms and conditions for use. The datasets used here include homestead-level coordinates as an essential component and these data are personally identifiable. Request to access the data can be made through the AHRI's institutional website (https://www.ahri.org/research/#research-department) and by email to AHRI's data department (ITservicedesk@ahri.org).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health
- Christopher Appleton
- Frank Tanser
Wellcome
- Frank Tanser
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Ethical approval was provided by the Biomedical Research Ethics Committee of the university of KwaZulu-Natal (reference #E165/05). Written informed consent was sought from parents or guardians of the participating children for both rounds of follow-up in 2007 and 2008 and assent obtained from the children during the follow-up surveys.
Copyright
© 2020, Mogeni et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,092
- views
-
- 107
- downloads
-
- 9
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Impact of community piped water coverage on re-infection with urogenital schistosomiasis in rural South Africa
eLife 9:e54012.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54012
Further reading
-
- Medicine
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Immunology and Inflammation
eLife has published articles on a wide range of infectious diseases, including COVID-19, influenza, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria and typhoid fever.
-
- Epidemiology and Global Health
Background:
Biological aging exhibits heterogeneity across multi-organ systems. However, it remains unclear how is lifestyle associated with overall and organ-specific aging and which factors contribute most in Southwest China.
Methods:
This study involved 8396 participants who completed two surveys from the China Multi-Ethnic Cohort (CMEC) study. The healthy lifestyle index (HLI) was developed using five lifestyle factors: smoking, alcohol, diet, exercise, and sleep. The comprehensive and organ-specific biological ages (BAs) were calculated using the Klemera–Doubal method based on longitudinal clinical laboratory measurements, and validation were conducted to select BA reflecting related diseases. Fixed effects model was used to examine the associations between HLI or its components and the acceleration of validated BAs. We further evaluated the relative contribution of lifestyle components to comprehension and organ systems BAs using quantile G-computation.
Results:
About two-thirds of participants changed HLI scores between surveys. After validation, three organ-specific BAs (the cardiopulmonary, metabolic, and liver BAs) were identified as reflective of specific diseases and included in further analyses with the comprehensive BA. The health alterations in HLI showed a protective association with the acceleration of all BAs, with a mean shift of –0.19 (95% CI −0.34, –0.03) in the comprehensive BA acceleration. Diet and smoking were the major contributors to overall negative associations of five lifestyle factors, with the comprehensive BA and metabolic BA accounting for 24% and 55% respectively.
Conclusions:
Healthy lifestyle changes were inversely related to comprehensive and organ-specific biological aging in Southwest China, with diet and smoking contributing most to comprehensive and metabolic BA separately. Our findings highlight the potential of lifestyle interventions to decelerate aging and identify intervention targets to limit organ-specific aging in less-developed regions.
Funding:
This work was primarily supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 82273740) and Sichuan Science and Technology Program (Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province, Grant No. 2024NSFSC0552). The CMEC study was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFC0907305, 2017YFC0907300). The sponsors had no role in the design, analysis, interpretation, or writing of this article.
