Unfinished Business: Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Remote Indigenous Communities in Australia's Northern Territory

Improving water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) outcomes for the ~60,000 Indigenous people living in remote communities in Australia's Northern Territory (NT) remains an important but unresolved policy challenge. Despite major national reforms aimed at bolstering Australia's water security over the last decade, the WASH situation in remote Indigenous communities (RICs) has attracted little attention. This study sheds new light on this issue by assessing the status of WASH indicators (access, behaviours, health outcomes) and identifying obstacles that constrain progress. Up-to-date information on access to WASH services in RICs in NT is scant. We piece together historical data to deduce that there is now almost universal access to improved water sources and sanitation facilities. At least 90% of dwellings currently have a piped water supply and a private sanitation facility. In the 72 largest communities, the quantity of water used by households is far greater than the Australian average, and regular testing reveals the water supplied is of good microbiological quality. The main infrastructure shortfalls - in terms of access, reliability and safety - can be found in the more than 400 small homeland communities, most of which have a population of less than 50. Notwithstanding nearly universal access to services, the burden of WASH-related diseases remains substantial. Indigenous children in remote communities are twice as likely to be hospitalised for intestinal infection as non-Indigenous children. Environmental enteropathy and prevalence of intestinal parasitic infestation (e.g. Strongyloides) provide further markers of excreta-related disease transmission. Trachoma remains endemic in many RICs despite repeated mass drug administrations. Skin infections are also prevalent, and these are thought to underlie disproportionately high rates of acute glomerulonephritis and acute rheumatic fever, both of which lead to chronic and life-threatening kidney and heart diseases. The WASH landscape in RICs therefore presents a paradox: widespread access to WASH infrastructure but a continued high burden of WASHrelated diseases. The underlying reasons for the situation are complex and inseparable from the entrenched socio-economic disadvantage that characterise many households in RICs. However, evidence points to several proximate causes that contribute to the high burden of WASH-related diseases: (i) problematic hygiene practices; (ii) non-functional health hardware within the home (taps, toilets); and (iii) high household occupancy rates. We conclude that past and current service delivery investments have helped to reduce WASH access disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, but they have failed to close the WASH-related disease gap. If future WASH investments in RICs are to yield optimal health dividends, the broader ecosystem must also be tackled, namely hygiene practices, maintenance of household-level hardware, and overcrowding

Urban Wind Turbines: A feasibility study

Current planning guidance in London requires all new and refurbished large buildings to produce 20 % of their electrical needs via renewable means (GLA, 2004). This policy came into effect in 2004. In compliance with the guidance London South Bank University installed a 6 kW wind turbine upon a refurbished office building. This paper summarises an investigation into the relationship between wind, energy, noise and vibration for the urban wind turbine. The eighteen month feasibility study took the form of measurement and predictions of wind, noise, vibration and energy generated. It concluded through optimising the position and height of the urban wind turbine it is possible to better harness the local wind resource such that the price per kWh generated is reduced to £0.15 over a 30 year period. This compares to the price per kWh of the current installation of £0.40. It was also found that the local community would normally not be affected by the noise produced by the turbine

Does the source of water for piped supplies affect child health? Evidence from rural vanuatu

© IWA Publishing 2019. Piped water systems are considered to provide the highest service level for drinking water supplies; however, global monitoring of safe water access pays little attention to the type of water source that piped systems draw upon, even if the water is not treated prior to distribution. This study sought to understand whether the source of water for untreated piped supplies influences the prevalence of diarrhoea among children in rural Vanuatu. The analysis was based on a dataset integrating a Demographic and Health Survey and a nationwide water supply inventory. After adjusting for a range of potential confounders, the results revealed a significant association between diarrhoea and the type of water source supplying a piped system. Compared with borehole-supplied piped systems, spring-fed piped systems were significantly associated with increased odds of diarrhoea (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 5.8, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.1–31, p = 0.040). No significant association between diarrhoea and piped systems drawing on surface water was observed. Increased odds of diarrhoea were significantly associated with water supply systems constructed prior to the year 2000 (AOR 4.9, 95% CI 1.9–13, p = 0.001). The results highlight the need for improvements in spring protection as well as ongoing maintenance and periodic renewal of water supply infrastructure

Scattering evaluation of equivalent surface impedances of acoustic metamaterials in large FDTD volumes using RLC circuit modelling

Most simulations involving metamaterials often require complex physics to be solved through refined meshing grids. However, it can prove challenging to simulate the effect of local physical conditions created by said metamaterials into much wider computing sceneries due to the increased meshing load. We thus present in this work a framework for simulating complex structures with detailed geometries, such as metamaterials, into large Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) computing environments by reducing them to their equivalent surface impedance represented by a parallel-series RLC circuit. This reduction helps to simplify the physics involved as well as drastically reducing the meshing load of the model and the implicit calculation time. Here, an emphasis is made on scattering comparisons between an acoustic metamaterial and its equivalent surface impedance through analytical and numerical methods. Additionally, the problem of fitting RLC parameters to complex impedance data obtained from transfer matrix models is herein solved using a novel approach based on zero crossings of admittance phase derivatives. Despite the simplification process, the proposed framework achieves good overall results with respect to the original acoustic scatterer while ensuring relatively short simulation times over a vast range of frequencies

On discretization in time in simulations of particulate flows

We propose a time discretization scheme for a class of ordinary differential equations arising in simulations of fluid/particle flows. The scheme is intended to work robustly in the lubrication regime when the distance between two particles immersed in the fluid or between a particle and the wall tends to zero. The idea consists in introducing a small threshold for the particle-wall distance below which the real trajectory of the particle is replaced by an approximated one where the distance is kept equal to the threshold value. The error of this approximation is estimated both theoretically and by numerical experiments. Our time marching scheme can be easily incorporated into a full simulation method where the velocity of the fluid is obtained by a numerical solution to Stokes or Navier-Stokes equations. We also provide a derivation of the asymptotic expansion for the lubrication force (used in our numerical experiments) acting on a disk immersed in a Newtonian fluid and approaching the wall. The method of this derivation is new and can be easily adapted to other cases

Documentation of Atlantic Tarpon (Megalops atlanticus) Space Use and Move Persistence in the Northern Gulf of Mexico Facilitated by Angler Advocates

Atlantic tarpon (Megalops atlanticus, hereafter tarpon) are facing a multitude of stressors and are considered Vulnerable by the IUCN; however, significant gaps remain in our understanding of tarpon space use and movement. From 2018 to 2019, citizen scientists facilitated tagging of 23 tarpon with SPOT tags to examine space use and movement across the northern Gulf of Mexico. Movement-based kernel densities were used to estimate simplified biased random bridge-based utilization distributions and a joint move persistence model was used to estimate a behavioral index for each fish. Tarpon showed consistent east–west movement from the Alabama/Florida border to Louisiana, and utilization distributions were highest in the Mississippi River Delta. Move persistence was highest in Alabama and Mississippi and lowest in Louisiana. Our examination of tarpon space use and movement indicates that Louisiana is a critical, yet understudied, part of their range