Environmental Health Engineering in the Tropics: An Introductory Text

This fully updated third edition of the classic text, widely cited as the most important and useful book for health engineering and disease prevention, describes infectious diseases in tropical and developing countries, and the effective measures that may be used against them.

The infections described include the diarrhoeal diseases, the common gut worms, Guinea worm, schistosomiasis, malaria, Bancroftian filariasis and other mosquito-borne infections. The environmental interventions that receive most attention are domestic water supplies and improved excreta disposal. Appropriate technology for these interventions, and also their impact on infectious diseases, are documented in detail.

This third edition includes new sections on arsenic in groundwater supplies and arsenic removal technologies, and new material in most chapters, including water supplies in developing countries and surface water drainage.

Sandy Cairncross is Professor of Environmental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. He has worked as a water and sanitation engineer for the Governments of Lesotho and Mozambique, set up Guinea worm eradication programmes in West Africa with UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and for nine years on the board of WaterAid and provided technical advice on water and environmental health to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and other agencies.

Sir Richard Feachem is Director of the Global Health Group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), USA, and Professor of Global Health at both UCSF and the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is also a Visiting Professor at London University, UK, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. From 2002 to 2007, Sir Richard served as founding Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and Under Secretary General of the United Nations. From 1995 until 1999, Dr Feachem was Director for Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank. Previously (from 1989 to 1995), he was Dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.