OUR SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: WATER

Sustainability Spotlight: Faculty

TESTING THE WATERS ON SANITATION

Thomas Clasen, Rose Salamone Gangarosa Chair in Sanitation and Safe Water

Thomas Clasen’s title says it all. As the Rose Salamone Gangarosa Chair in Sanitation and Safe Water in Rollins School of Public Health, he takes a holistic approach to environmental health interventions in poor rural and informal urban settlements. “These threats — poor sanitation, unsafe drinking water, polluted air — all happen to the same people; it’s the same setting,” he says. “We’ve proven you can combine interventions without adversely affecting their adoption and potentially reap synergistic effects between them.”

In more than eleven years of research in Odisha, India, the most promising program he evaluated piped water into each household only after everyone in the village had a latrine — reinforcing how sanitation and water quality go hand in hand. 

He’s on the leadership team of RISE (Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments), which will guide settlements in Fiji and Indonesia in recycling their wastewater and creating green space for food production.  

In Rwanda, he evaluated a program that gave 104,000 households both a water filter and an improved cook stove. Diarrhea decreased by 29 percent. While indoor air quality did not markedly improve, the frequency of acute respiratory infections did. “Our hypothesis is that the improvements to the gut from the water filter reduced systemic stress,” he says, “and enabled the respiratory system to respond better.”

Clasen just played a key role in shaping the World Health Organization’s sanitation standards, more than forty years after the organization had passed drinking water standards. “If we get the sanitation right,” he says, “that makes our job of maintaining the integrity of the water so much easier.”

—Kristin Baird Rattini