Institute for Public Health and Water Quality Chairman Paul Hunter stood in the foyer of the Reynolds Medical Building on the Texas A&M University campus and revealed a staggering statistic.
Around the globe, he said, a child dies from a water-borne disease every eight to 10 seconds.
But Hunter said he hoped to decrease that mortality rate with help from a new partnership between the institute and the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health.
"I hope this is an incredibly long-term venture that really makes a difference in people's lives," said Hunter, a professor at the University of East Anglia in England and a leading expert on water and health.
The partnership between the School of Rural Public Health and the Institute for Public Health and Water Quality, which has relocated to College Station from the University of Illinois, was formally announced Tuesday.
As part of the collaboration, the School of Rural Public Health will establish a Center for Excellence in Public Health and Water Research that will tackle issues related to contaminated drinking water, water conservation and safe reuse of water.
"I think this begins our commitment to improve drinking water quality in the United States and worldwide," said Roderick McCallum, interim dean of the School of Rural Public Health and vice president for academic affairs for the Health Science Center.
The Institute for Public Health and Water Quality was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 2005 while at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The independent institute focuses on science and education and stresses public health through safe drinking water.
Institute Executive Director Jennie Ward-Robinson said she and others looked at several universities -- including the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University -- before deciding on a location. After they looked at the faculty and research at Texas A&M, it became obvious where the institute needed to be, she said.
"At the end of the day ... there was no doubt this was the place for IPWR to call home," Ward-Robinson said.
The institute is under the School of Rural Public Health, and researchers are expected to partner with their counterparts in related Texas A&M University departments.
Hunter said he and others were drawn to Texas A&M because it featured, in one place, all the necessary fields of study -- environmental engineering, agriculture and small-scale water engineering, in particular. He also lauded the School of Rural Public Health, the only school of its kind focused on rural health.
"Water-borne diseases and water problems are very much a rural health problem," Hunter said, explaining the difficulty of providing to rural residents a system that is both cost-efficient and easy to operate.
Hunter pointed to a previous project in Puerto Rico as a real-world example of the work that would be done by the partnership. Often researchers make the mistake of going into a community and implementing a complicated system without providing the necessary training, he said.
"All right, you'll do," Hunter said, explaining how community members are often randomly selected. "I'm going to talk to you for an hour about water quality. Won't that be good?"
But researchers have found that it is more efficient to offer in-depth training to an elected member of the community. In such cases, he said, results have shown that water quality goes up and deaths go down.
The new partnership hopes to duplicate results from Puerto Rico on a better-defined scale in Trinidad, he said.
If that effort succeeds, researchers can take their evidence-based results to policymakers and help them make informed decisions on water-quality standards, said Hunter and Nancy Dickey, president of the Health Science Center and vice chancellor for health affairs.
"As you well know, the Health Science Center is dedicated to fostering ... scientific discoveries and translating them into real-world solutions," Dickey said, adding that the partnership would "truly highlight the number of programs offered by both the university and the Health Science Center."
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