Prof. Billington in the Uncommon Collaborator Series

Stanford team tackles public health and environmental impacts together

Professor Billington participated in an “uncommon collaborator” dialogue through the Woods Institute for the Environment discussing a project she is contributing to, led by Prof. Jade Benjamin-Chung from the Department of Epidemiology in the Stanford School of Medicine in partnership with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh.

Unlike dirt floors common in some rural parts of the world, concrete floors are easily cleaned of disease-carrying pathogens – but they come at a high environmental cost. A lower-carbon flooring mix could provide a solution. Together with Prof. Ali Boehm and Prof. Mike Lepech the team has been exploring the impact of different types of cement-based floors to study to rates of survival of E. coli and Ascaris suum, an intestinal worm like those often found in the soil floors of homes in the study site in Bangladesh.

Initial findings suggest that the pathogens have similar rates of survival on traditional cement mix slabs and “green” alternative fly ash slabs. This finding means that when installed in homes, the alternative cement mix could be just as effective as traditional concrete at reducing disease transmission.

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