Gates Says Too Many Kids' Deaths Are Preventable

According to the World Health Organization, about 2.2 million kids under the age of 5 die every year from diarrheal diseases. The vast majority of these deaths could be prevented with basic hygiene, water quality improvements and sanitation.

Why is it so hard to fix these problems? In the past, focus has been too heavily on major infrastructure projects, which have proved prohibitively expensive for developing countries to build and maintain. Now innovators are starting to think about simpler, lower-tech solutions.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have granted $10.9 million to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, to conduct evaluations of several such solutions, according to a press release. The interventions they are testing are "combined intervention packages" that join approaches to sanitation, water and hand-washing together into single projects.

"Right now, it is unknown whether single interventions are as cost effective as combinations of these interventions. This grant will fund the first large-scale, randomized impact evaluation designed to gather rigorous evidence about this question," said Dr. Jack Colford, professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and the project's coordinator.

The study will take on its randomized impact evaluation in Bangladesh and Kenya to uncover whether the results of these packaged small-scale solutions compare to the traditional large-scale interventions.

Photo courtesy of IRRI Images, via Flickr