Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2006) 100, 863866

available at www.sciencedirect.com

journal homepage: www.elsevierhealth.com/journals/trst

Appropriate technology for rural India solar

decontamination of water for emergency settings
and small communities
Gagandeep Kang a,, Sheela Roy a, Vinohar Balraj b

a
Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences, Christian Medical College, Vellore 632004, Tamilnadu, India
b
Department of Community Health, Christian Medical College, Vellore 632004, Tamilnadu, India

Received 14 July 2005; received in revised form 3 September 2005; accepted 5 September 2005
Available online 14 November 2005

KEYWORDS Summary A commercial solar water heating system was evaluated for its effectiveness in
decontaminating drinking water with a view to use in emergency situations. A total of 18 seeding
Solar heating;
experiments carried out over 6 months with 105 to 107 Escherichia coli/ml showed that the solar
Disinfection;
heater produced 125 l of bacteriologically safe water in 4 h when the ambient temperature was
Water contamination;
above 30 C, with a holding time of at least 2 h. The solar water heating system is inexpensive,
Waterborne disease;
easy to transport and set up and could provide safer drinking water for 50 people a day. It would
India
be effective in the decrease and prevention of waterborne disease in emergency situations, and
is appropriate for use in small communities.
2005 Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights
reserved.

1. Introduction disasters, supply of safe drinking water becomes an urgent

In developing countries, diseases transmitted through drink-
ing water continue to cause serious morbidity and mortality.
With limited availability of resources, at most times and in
most developing country settings, the burden of ensuring
the safety of drinking water rests with the consumer. Several
methods for improving water quality have been evaluated in
the past few decades, including chlorination, occulation,
ltration, and thermal or ultraviolet inactivation (Clasen
and Cairncross, 2004; Sobsey, 2002). However, in natural
Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 416 2283071;
mobile: +91 9894070266; fax: +91 416 2232035.
E-mail address: gkang@cmcvellore.ac.in (G. Kang).
public health priority to prevent transmission of waterborne
diseases, including gastroenteritis and enterically transmit-
ted hepatitis (Waring and Brown, 2005).
Two months after the tsunami in southern India, in Febru-
ary 2005, 16 cases of hepatitis were reported from a group
of villages where teams from the Christian Medical Col-
lege Hospital, Vellore, provided emergency health care (J.
Paul, personal communication). India does not, as yet, have
an ofcial surveillance system to record all cases of infec-
tious disease. The area in which the relief team worked is
about 80 km from any major road, and the nearest labora-
tory testing facilities for establishing the cause of disease is
at least 300 km away. The relief team had not gone prepared
to collect samples from affected individuals and, hence,
no laboratory-documented aetiology is available. The wide

0035-9203/$ see front matter 2005 Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.trstmh.2005.09.004
864
range of ages affected suggested the outbreak was possi-
bly due to hepatitis E virus. Chlorine-based disinfectants
had been provided for drinking water disinfection, but ear-
lier community-based studies had shown poor compliance
because of the smell and change in the taste of water
(J. Firth et al., unpublished data). The relief team, which
consisted of doctors, paramedical workers and counsellors,
requested an evaluation of effective water-treatment meth-
ods for use in emergency situations in small communities, at
a cost of US$0.02 per litre or less.
Boiling, reverse osmosis systems and hypochlorite gen-
eration systems were considered inappropriate because of
energy and equipment costs. Solar disinfection (SODIS) of
water using transparent plastic containers that we had eval-
uated earlier had achieved a maximum temperature of
57 C, which, although effective in reducing bacterial con-
tamination, produced small quantities of treated water,
required careful handling or replacement of containers and
was not adequate to inactivate hepatitis A virus (A. Rose
et al., unpublished data). Both thermal and ultraviolet sys-
tems were considered. Although the synergistic effect of
heat and UV radiation has been documented for bacteria
at a temperature above 50 C, no studies have examined
their effect on hepatitis viruses (Ciochetti and Metcalf,
1984; Rijal and Fujioka, 2003). In studies using solar dis-
infection it has been shown that a number of factors play a
role in determining the effect on temperature and the ef-
cacy of UV inactivation, including latitude, season, weather,
time of day, the nature of the organisms and the charac-
teristics of the source water and the containers used (Acra
et al., 1984). When thermal inactivation alone is consid-
ered, hepatitis A virus is inactivated by incubation for 1 h at
66 C and hepatitis E at 56 C for 1 h (Emerson et al., 2005)
under experimental conditions, but no eld tests have been
conducted. A number of solar disinfection techniques have
been evaluated in the eld and under experimental con-
ditions, including solar disinfection in bottles (reviewed by
Clasen and Cairncross, 2004), solar cookers (Safapour and
Metcalf, 1999) and custom-designed units (Caslake et al.,
2004; Fjendbo Jorgensen et al., 1998; Walker et al., 2004),
but these are not commercially available in India. We there-
fore evaluated an easily available commercial water heating
system for its efcacy in raising temperature and inactivat-
ing coliforms under a range of experimental conditions.
2. Materials and methods
A commercially available solar water heating system (Sintex,
Chennai, India, model SWHS-125 LPD), costing approxi-
mately US$220, was evaluated. The system has a horizontal
125-l double-walled, insulated storage tank and a sin-
gle, covered collector panel (2 1 0.1 m), containing a
thermo-plastic pipe (1.8 m long, 2.5 cm inner diameter) that
allows 125 l of water to pass though in 1 h (Figure 1). This
panel is installed to allow maximum exposure to sunshine
through the year. Heated water from within the pipe ows
up into the storage tank and down again into the panel by
thermosiphoning, exposing the water repeatedly to sunlight.
For each test, the 125-l tank was seeded with 105 or 107
Escherichia coli/ml from a freshly prepared log phase cul-
ture, by introduction of the culture into a half-lled tank,
G. Kang et al.
Figure 1 A commercially available 125-l capacity solar water
heating system evaluated for water decontamination.
which was subsequently lled completely and closed. The
water used for seeding and testing was tap water, with a
high content of dissolved salts (range 230330 ppm), with
no measurable residual chlorine estimated by the diethyl-
P-phenylenediamine colorimetric method and with low tur-
bidity (nephelometric turbidity units <10). For sampling at
each time point, at least 5 l of water was allowed to run
to waste, before a 200 ml sample of water was withdrawn
into a sterile ask. A sample was taken immediately after
seeding to check the number of viable organisms introduced.
Aliquots of water were also drawn at 2-h intervals and col-
iform count estimation carried out by the multiple tube
test (Brick et al., 2004). Recordings of ambient and water
temperature were taken at each water sampling. The exper-
iments were repeated a total of 18 times, from February to
August 2005, with 13 experiments being carried out during
sunny weather and ve experiments during cloudy weather
or rain. The intensity of the sunlight was not measured, as
there is no meteorological ofce in Vellore with the required
equipment.
A reusable water pasteurization indicator (WAPI, Solar
Cookers International, Sacramento, CA, USA), which has a
soy wax that melts when immersed in water over 65 C, was
also used to check whether the water had reached that tem-
perature. This indicator was tested to examine whether it
would be a useful test for ensuring that drinking water would
not transmit agents of hepatitis. Between tests, the tank
was cleaned by ushing with tap water and a coliform count
check was run to ensure that there were no residual bacteria
from previous tests.
3. Results
Testing dilutions of water withdrawn immediately after
seeding by the multiple tube test showed that recovery of
viable bacteria was always within one log of the number of
seeded bacteria in all experiments.
Seeding with 105 or 107 E. coli/ml and solar heating for 4 h
resulted in at least a 4 log reduction in coliform counts when
compared with water tested immediately after seeding. The
results in Table 1 show the mean values of the ambient and
Solar decontamination of water for emergencies
Table 1 Effect of solar heating on water temperatures and coliform counts in 125 l of water seeded with 107 Escherichia coli/ml
Weather/time Mean ambient Mean water
temperature ( C) temperature ( C)
Sun
Seeding (11.30 am) 31 3.1 30 3.2
2 h post-seeding 37 3.5 55 4.5
4 h post-seeding 38 3.4 62 6.1
Cloud/rain
Seeding (11.30 am) 30 3.2 30 2.8
2 h post-seeding 29 3.1 45 4.2
4 h post-seeding 28 3.5 45 3.5
water temperature, and the coliform counts at seeding, and
at 2 and 4 h post-seeding, as well as the state of the WAPI
indicator. The WAPI indicator was an easy-to-use, reusable
system, which provided an estimate of water pasteurization
within a few minutes. However, because the test was being
conducted in a 125-l tank, the indicator had to be lowered
into the tank on a long string.
On sunny days, water seeded with either 105 or 107
E. coli/ml was negative for coliforms within 2 h. On days with
lower ambient temperature, it took at least 4 h to reduce the
coliform count by 4 logs.
4. Discussion
The solar heater decreased or eliminated bacterial contam-
ination in 125 l of water in 2 h, when seeded with up to
107 coliforms per ml, reducing bacterial counts by at least
4 logs even on cloudy days with relatively low ambient tem-
peratures of 25 C. On rainy days, the water temperature
was sufcient to decrease, but not eliminate, bacteria from
a heavily contaminated sample. On sunny days, water in
this heater achieved a temperature sufcient to kill a high
concentration of faecal coliforms and inactivate hepatitis A
virus after 4 h. Although water treated by this system would
not always meet the WHO criteria for safe water, it has
been estimated that reduction of water contamination by
two orders of magnitude would lead to a 40% reduction in
diarrhoea, in areas with reasonable sanitation (VanDerslice
and Briscoe, 1995).
Earlier reports have evaluated commercially avail-
able solar cookers for their ability to inactivate bacteria
(Safapour and Metcalf, 1999), but a system commercially
available in a developing country has not been previously
evaluated. This water heating system could produce at
least 125 l of water a day, which is sufcient drinking water
for 50 people, with no requirements for fuel or electricity.
The estimated cost for providing 1 l of safe drinking water
was estimated at US$0.01, assuming that the heater would
be used for at least 6 months, and not including the cost
of purchasing water. If the heater was used for a longer
period of time, the cost/l would decrease. Compared with
previously estimated costs (Sobsey, 2002), the technique is
less expensive than any other water disinfection technique
except solar disinfection in discarded plastic bottles. In an
emergency situation, clean water supplies are a priority
for aid agencies, but can take time to organize. While it
865
Coliform count WAPI indicator
range per ml
>105 Solid
0 Solid
0 11/13 liquid
>105 Solid
103 Solid
102 Solid
is also possible for individuals to decontaminate or disin-
fect water for themselves, it may be difcult to provide
information and motivation in a disaster setting. India has
an extensive network of suppliers marketing a variety of
solar water heaters that can be assembled quickly. This
system is easily available in southern India, inexpensive,
sturdy and easy to transport. Although further tests with
waters of varying turbidity and specic bacterial, viral and
parasitic pathogens would be of benet, we believe that
our study establishes grounds for a wider application of
this experiment, in both emergency situations and in small
communities with unprotected or semi-protected water
sources.
Conicts of interest statement
The authors have no conicts of interest concerning the work
reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We thank Mr D. Chandrashekar of Sintex International for
providing us with details of the solar water heating sys-
tem. Internal funding was received from the Department
of Gastrointestinal Sciences, Christian Medical College,
Vellore.
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