Diarrhea is among the major cause of death and morbidity around the globe. A review by Meki CD. et al. summarizes existing frameworks that desire to mitigate the risks of waterborne diarrheal diseases and illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these frameworks.

They included published frameworks that were designed to mitigate the risks of waterborne diarrheal diseases by exploring PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Google Free Search, organization websites, and reference lists of identified sources.

They charted the data using the Joanna Briggs Institute tool and summarized the results, and described them narratively. They also developed a criterion to score the strengths and weaknesses of the included frameworks.

Meki CD. et al. identified five frameworks, including the hygiene improvement framework, community-led total sanitation, universal action plan for pneumonia and diarrhea, participatory hygiene and sanitation transformation, and sanitation and family education. These frameworks had many identical components, like recognizing the problems and risk factors, identifying and implementing the interventions, and evaluating and monitoring. The frameworks included different interventions like various infrastructure, health promotion, and education, facilitating environment and clinical treatments. The majority of these frameworks enclosed health promotion and education. All the frameworks were strengthened by enclosing strategies for executing and delivering the intervention, human resource aspect, community involvement, monitoring, and evaluation. Their weaknesses included not addressing components for collecting, storing, and transferring electronic data and the frameworks not particularly designed for mitigating waterborne diarrheal diseases. Additionally, they found these frameworks to be effective in mitigating the risk of diarrhea diseases, among other health effects.

Thus to summarize, there is a need to specifically update the existing frameworks to mitigate waterborne diarrheal diseases that include the strengths and addresses weaknesses of reviewed frameworks.

Meki CD, Ncube EJ, Voyi K. Frameworks for mitigating the risk of waterborne diarrheal diseases: A scoping review. PLoS ONE. 2022;17(12): e0278184. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278184