CBS Newsletter Winter 1996 pg 6 UV Waterworks Reliable Inexpensive Water Disinfection for the World The UV Waterworks water disinfection unit with a plastic cover and cutaway reflector revealing its interior In the developing world waterborne diseases such as cholera typhoid fever gastroenteritis dysentery and infectious hepatitis worldwide kill more than 400 children every hour and result in the loss of billions of hours of worker productivity each year Municipal tap water is uncommon in many developing country households and two out of three people in the world must fetch water from outside their homes In India water purity issues are particularly important during the monsoon season when heavy rainfall washes raw sewage and other contaminated material from the fields into the wells and surface water Disinfecting water by boiling it over cookstoves increases the burden on those collecting the fuelwood mostly women and children and also stresses the biomass resource Gathering wood occupies time that might be spent productively in other activities To address this significant public health and energy problem an effort is underway at the Center s Indoor Environment Program to introduce a water purification system using ultraviolet light to rural villages in India Mexico and South Africa The goal of this project is to design and field test a water purification device for developing countries that is durable easy to use and inexpensive and can be constructed and maintained locally It has resulted in the development of a prototype device called UV Waterworks We began our research early in the summer of 1993 and increased our efforts considerably in August 1993 when an outbreak of cholera was reported in India Thailand and Bangladesh A year later the cholera epidemic continued to be a problem in India approximately 2 200 people died from cholera in the state of Bihar between the months of May and August 1994 Other waterborne diseases also pose a serious health threat to Indian communities In the state of Orissa alone a