Runs on the Roads

Posted on December 5, 2006 in Development

If you’ve been worried about plans to build a new highway through your community, perhaps you might want to clip this article from Scientific American and share it with your neighbors:

Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues found that remote Ecuadorian villages had nearly one third as many cases of diarrhea than their more accessible counterparts. Diarrheal disease caused by Escherichia coli, rotavirus and the parasite Giardia spreads through contaminated food, water and by person-to-person contact. “Roads have been very important in allowing and facilitating the spread of everything one needs to set up an infection,” says Mary Wilson, a professor of population and international health at Harvard University, who was not involved with this study.