The motivation for organizing the session was in response to World Health Organization estimates that over 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, with a significant fraction of these people living in remote villages in developing countries. Because these communities lack the infrastructure for centralized water treatment and distribution, the need exists for simple and sustainable point-of-use water treatment systems. Papers presented at the conference focused on understanding and improving existing technologies and developing new technologies for water treatment in global developing communities. Papers addressed pathogen and turbidity removal as well as removal of dissolved constituents of concern in remote villages such as arsenic and fluoride. The papers reported on mechanistic laboratory-based studies, field implementation case studies, and regional efforts to develop sustainable point-of-use water treatment programs.

Below is a list of the papers submitted to the session:

• Environmental Health and Water Quality in Complex Emergencies

Franklin Broadhurst, International Rescue Committee (invited)

• Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage for the Developing World: Recent Developments from the Lab and the Field

Mark D. Sobsey, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (invited)

• Mechanistic Laboratory Evaluation of a Point-of-Use Ceramic Water Filter to Deactivate Coliform Bacteria

Vinka O. Craver and James A. Smith, University of Virginia

• Development of a Safe Water Supply at Iringa, Tanzania

Clifford W. Randall, Virginia Tech

• Simple Water Treatment Technologies: Arsenic and Fluoride Removal using Low-Cost Materials

Thabani Mlilo, Laura Brunson, Christopher Braumert, Shristi Rajbhandari, and David Sabatini

• Sustainable Water Purification for the Developing World: Multidisciplinary Education for the International Engineer

Ross Gordon, Monica Dyer, Geoffrey Preidis, Pedro Alvarez, and Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice University

• Sustainable POU Water Filtration in Guatemala: Materials, Manufacturing, Economics, Health Beliefs

A. Curt Elmore, James H. Martin, Julie Gallaway, William G. Fahrenholtz, Jeffrey D. Smith, and Joel G. Burken, University of Missouri – Rolla

• Removal of Virus-Sized Particles and E. coli by the Filtron

Angela R. Bielefeldt, R. Scott Summers, Kate Kowalski, Ben Bishop, and Anisha Malhotra, University of Colorado

• The UV Tube: Low-cost, point-of-use disinfection of drinking water with ultraviolet light

Kara L. Nelson, University of Colorado – Berkeley

• Bringing Household Water Treatment to Scale: Designing for Sustainability

Daniele S. Lantagne, Robert E. Quick, and Eric Mintz, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• Development of Intermittent Slow Sand Filtration for Rural Households in the River Njoro Watershed, Kenya

Sangya-Sangam Tiwari, Marion W. Jenkins, Charles Maina-Gichaba, WycliffeSaenyi, Jeannie Darby, University of California – Davis

• Anthropological Approaches to Environmental Engineering: Drinking Water Quality in Rural Honduras

Karla L. Davis-Salazar and Jeffrey A. Cunningham, University of South Florida

• Sustainable Arsenic Remediation in the Indian Subcontinent

Lee M. Blaney, Sudipta Sarkar, Anirban Gupta, and Arup K. SenGupta, Lehigh University

• AguaClara: An Innovative Model for Providing Safe Water in the Global South

Monroe L. Weber-Shirk, Cornell University

• Full-scale and Bench-scale Microbial Challenge Experiments with the Biosand Household Drinking Water Filter