Water supply and management issues discussed at the Aid and Trade conference, Washington D.C. September 20, 2009 09:42

At this recent workshop on water supply and management, Wagtech stressed the importance of developing a realistic plan to provide safe drinking water to all human beings, and discussed some of the challenges faced in moving toward this goal.

Speaking at the International Aid and Trade conference, Neil Wrigglesworth, the export sales manager at Wagtech, exemplified the situation we face by stating that “access to safe drinking water is a basic human right…but each year there are 1.6 million deaths due to diarrhea alone”.

Against that backdrop, he emphasized the need for efficient and sustainable portable water testing programs. The Wagtech test kits have been successfully used in disaster-hit areas across the world and have become the solution for the major UN Organizations and NGO’s. A notable case study was highlighted whereby Wagtech recently provided 13 mobile laboratories to three major cities in Northern Iraq in a €2 million environmental surveillance project.

Outlining the characteristics of good kits, Mr. Wrigglesworth said that they should be lightweight and durable, and one shouldn’t have to be a technician to use one. Among the benefits of the Wagtech kits, he said, is that the analysis they conduct conforms to World Health Organization guidelines. Further, he added, the kits also reduce the dependence on a central, fixed-site laboratory for water testing.

Mr. Wrigglesworth was speaking having just returned from a visit to Zimbabwe where the infrastructure for monitoring water quality has broken down entirely and the country has neither the staff nor the money to revive it. “The central and fixed-site labs are no longer functioning” he said, adding that in such a situation portable kits can reduce the dependency on laboratories.

“In many countries, they don’t have any information [on water quality], especially in rural and poor urban areas. A rapid field assessment will provide the first set of usable information on water quality in a country and this can be the basis for determining a national routine monitoring and surveillance program”. Mr. Wrigglesworth described Wagtech as “a lab in a box” and surmised that “field testing is logistically easier and more cost-effective”.

< Previous
Next >