# Effect of drinking water treatment on bacterial strain sharing among Kenyan children

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY · 2022 · $264,834

## Abstract

SUMMARY
In communities with high rates of diarrhea and enteric infections, the spatial scale of bacterial strain sharing in
young children has not been well studied. Yet, understanding these transmission patterns is critical knowledge
for selecting and implementing interventions to protect child health in resource-constrained environments.
Water treatment interventions are often targeted at the household level, yet recent large-scale trials of
household-level interventions have not consistently shown reductions in child diarrhea prevalence. One
explanation is that household-level drinking water interventions fail to disrupt community transmission
pathways, resulting in continued child exposure to bacterial pathogens. Here, we will investigate strain sharing
between child pairs at multiple spatial scales, including within households and between households across
urban and rural settings. We will leverage previously collected (by our team) fecal samples from 240 sets of
siblings (n=480 children), including siblings from 120 urban households and 120 rural households. In both
urban and rural study sites, we will have the unique opportunity to sample from equal numbers of households
from villages with and without access to community-wide drinking water chlorination. We will 1) compare the
scale of bacterial strain sharing in rural versus urban communities in Kenya; and 2) evaluate the effect of
access to community-wide chlorination on bacterial strain sharing in both urban and rural communities. Our
study population will also allow us to investigate if bacterial strain sharing patterns and community-wide water
treatment effects differ for younger versus older school-aged children. We will use short-read metagenomic
sequencing and a new innovative suite of computational bacterial strain tracking tools developed by our team
to achieve these aims. Our findings will inform the scope and scale at which future drinking water and other
environmental interventions should be implemented, and if the delivery of interventions designed to protect
young children from exposure to bacterial pathogens should be different for rural versus urban communities.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10509987
- **Project number:** 1R21AI171890-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
- **Principal Investigator:** Ashlee Miriam Earl
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $264,834
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-06-01 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10509987

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10509987, Effect of drinking water treatment on bacterial strain sharing among Kenyan children (1R21AI171890-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10509987. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*