Wolf Schmidt is part of a team currently designing a non-pharmacological school-based hygiene intervention in the UK. He is looking at the burden of infuenza-related morbidity within school children.

Developing, testing and implementing complex interventions is a multi-step process which is being addressed in a number of phases. It will consist of formative research and qualitative testing during the first phase. The aim is to follow this with an exploratory study conducted during the influenza season.

Hygiene Centre staff Tamer Rabie and Adam Biran have designed and implemented a trial with the aid of a collaborator in Pune, India.

The aim is to:

- collect preparatory data for a Randomised Control Trial (RCT) of the health impact of hand washing.
- to Develop and test methods for monitoring hand washing compliance.
- to measure the importance of hand washing with soap relative to other risk factors for acute respiratory infections.

The data is currently being analysed by Tamer Rabie (who is now at the World Bank)

Hygiene centre staff also review data and publications from other trials and research.

Data is presented in many ways, one recent publication being the Protocol for a Cochrane Review by Tom Clasen, Ian Roberts, Tamer Rabie and Sandy Cairncross on Interventions to improve water quality for preventing diarrhoea. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2004, Issue 2. Art. No.:CD004794

The aim of the work was to assess interventions to improve the microbiological quality of drinking water on preventing diarrhoea among children and adults.