Solar Drinking Water Disinfection (SODIS) to Reduce Childhood Diarrhea - Recent Advances and Issues in Environmental Science - page 201

Figure 4. Compliance of using SODIS and child diarrhea in rural Bolivia. Compliance of SODIS use
is estimated as the proportion of weeks a family has been classified as a SODIS user by community-
based project staff. Dots, number of episodes per child-year at risk. Small random noise was added
to the dots to avoid over plotting. Only children with at least 110 d under observation are included.
The median proportion of sunny days with more than 6 hr of sunshine was 70.2%
and 67.2% in intervention and control communities, respectively, consistent with the
technical and climatic conditions necessary for the proper functioning of the ultravio-
let SODIS purifi cation process [29] during the study (Table 4).
DISCUSSION
We conducted a community-randomized trial within the operations of an ongoing na-
tional SODIS-dissemination program, which provided an intensive training and re-
peated reinforcement of the SODIS intervention throughout the study period. In this
context of a “natural experiment” we found a RR of 0.81 for the IR of diarrhea epi-
sodes among children assigned to SODIS compared to controls. However, the CI was
broad and included unity (RR = 0.81, 95% CI 0.59-1.12) and, therefore, we conclude
that there is no strong evidence for a substantive reduction in diarrhea among children