How does funding for water and sanitation research compare to funding for vaccine R&D for waterborne diseases?
That’s a sore point. When I hear about vaccine efforts for something like hookworm, I think, Why is this effort going into a vaccine for hookworm when there is so little funding for sanitation research and when sanitation is such a fundamental need? And you might say, Well, why do we even need research for sanitation, isn’t it simple? But it turns out that the more we learn about sanitation, the more we learn about the many mistakes we’ve made in the past. That’s why we still have 40% of the world’s population without sanitation. It’s partly hardware issues, and a lot of software issues – in terms of, how do you have an effective, sustainable, scalable intervention. And there’s a lot we don’t know. So I do get concerned about money and resources and effort going into vaccine development for diseases that I think would be better reduced by water and sanitation. Take the CWW drug donation programmes – the school children take one pill every six months. Simple, right? But it takes a lot
