The University of North Carolina Water Institute’s Water and Health Substack.

The UNC Water & Health Substack is free to read and subscribe to on Substack. If your work involves water quality, sanitation, hygiene, environmental health, infectious disease, WASH policy, or public health, subscribe and make it part of your regular scan of the field.

One Place to Keep Up with Water and Health Research

Anyone working in water, sanitation, and hygiene knows the problem: there is more useful research being published than most of us can realistically follow.

A study on drinking water quality appears in one journal. Research on sanitation and enteric disease turns up somewhere else. New evidence on antimicrobial resistance is published in a public health journal we may not routinely monitor. Conference announcements circulate through professional networks. Funding opportunities appear on agency websites, often with little connection to the research conversations that should inform them.

Keeping up can become a research project of its own.

That is the problem the UNC Water & Health Substack is designed to address.

The newsletter brings together recent peer-reviewed research, conferences, and funding resources relevant to the WASH community. It is intended as a recurring current-awareness resource for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, public health professionals, students, and others who need to know what is happening across the field but do not have time to monitor dozens of journals and institutional websites.

The first issue, published September 9, 2026, provides a good indication of what that approach can offer.

A WASH problem can be closer than we think

One of the strengths of the first issue is its refusal to treat WASH as primarily a low- and middle-income country concern.

The research moves from rural Nepal and urban Ghana to Pennsylvania and Alabama, creating connections that can easily be missed when research is divided into separate geographic or disciplinary silos.

Consider sanitation in Alabama's Black Belt.

For many people in the United States, inadequate sanitation infrastructure is something associated with distant places. Yet research featured in the newsletter documents fecal contamination and pathogen hazards associated with failing septic systems in communities in Alabama's Black Belt.

The importance of this research extends beyond one region. It raises a larger question for WASH professionals: What problems remain hidden when national income classifications shape our assumptions about where inadequate sanitation exists?

A related Water Institute study is evaluating community-wide sanitation infrastructure in the same region. Together, these studies connect environmental monitoring, infrastructure, health, inequality, and policy in ways that should be familiar to WASH practitioners working anywhere in the world.

The geography changes. Many of the underlying questions do not.

The latrine is only part of the sanitation system

Research from rural Nepal featured in the first issue offers another example of why close attention to the details of WASH systems matters.

Researchers examined contamination of latrine surfaces and hygiene conditions, including the water used for cleansing. Their findings raise concerns not only about diarrhoeal disease but also about urinary tract infection risks for women.

That observation shifts attention from whether a household simply has access to a latrine toward what happens during actual use.

Is the cleansing water safe? Are surfaces contaminated? What exposure pathways remain after infrastructure has been installed?

For practitioners, this is an important reminder that sanitation coverage alone cannot describe sanitation safety. Infrastructure, water quality, maintenance, hygiene behavior, microbial exposure, and everyday practices interact.

A latrine can exist and still leave important routes of exposure unresolved.

Antimicrobial resistance is also a water problem

Another study takes us to Accra, Ghana, where researchers investigated antibiotic resistance in urban waters and hospital effluents.

Antimicrobial resistance is often discussed through the lens of clinical medicine: prescribing practices, antibiotic use, hospital infection control, and pharmaceutical stewardship. Environmental pathways complicate that picture.

Wastewater and contaminated urban waters can become part of the ecology through which resistant organisms and resistance determinants circulate.

For WASH professionals, that places antimicrobial resistance squarely within conversations about sanitation, wastewater management, environmental surveillance, and public health.

It also illustrates why a newsletter crossing disciplinary boundaries can be useful. Important WASH research does not necessarily appear in publications labeled "WASH." Relevant evidence may emerge from microbiology, epidemiology, environmental science, behavioral science, engineering, infectious disease, or health policy.

Finding those connections is part of the work.

Private water does not mean private risk

The first issue also highlights research on private wells in the United States.

One study examines private well water and enteric disease risk. Another explores water insecurity among households relying on private wells in Pennsylvania. A separate policy analysis looks at how U.S. states regulate emerging contaminants in public water systems.

Together, these studies complicate a familiar assumption that safe drinking water is essentially a solved problem in high-income settings.

Millions of people depend on water systems that fall outside some of the protections associated with regulated public supplies. The resulting questions about monitoring, household responsibility, environmental exposure, regulation, and inequality belong in the same professional conversation as drinking water challenges elsewhere.

That cross-context perspective is central to the newsletter.

The first issue includes peer-reviewed, open-access research from both LMICs and HICs on drinking water, sanitation, antimicrobial resistance, enteric disease, hygiene behavior, environmental health, onsite sanitation, food safety, parasitic infections, emerging contaminants, and drinking water microbiomes.

Three featured studies come from The Water Institute at UNC, while the remainder draw from journals and researchers across the wider field.

The goal is not simply to accumulate articles. It is to make useful research easier to find.

From evidence to professional opportunity

Research is only one part of staying current.

WASH professionals also need to know where colleagues are gathering, what issues are moving onto international agendas, and where resources may be available to support new work.

That is why the newsletter pairs its research digest with a conference calendar and funding resources.

The first issue looks ahead through 2027, identifying events ranging from the IWA World Water Congress and the UNC Water and Health Conference to World Toilet Day, the UN Water Conference on SDG 6, and the World Water Forum.

It also points readers toward funding and procurement sources including the African Water Facility, Asian Development Bank, International Development Research Centre, National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Water Research Foundation.

Bringing these elements together matters.

A newly published study can suggest a research question. A conference can provide a place to discuss it. A funding opportunity can help turn that question into a project.

Usually, professionals have to track those streams separately.

The UNC Water & Health Substack puts them in one place.

A recurring resource for the WASH community

No newsletter can capture everything being published across a field as broad as water and health. Nor should it try.

The more useful goal is curation: identifying research and professional resources worth bringing to the attention of people who are already managing crowded inboxes, journal alerts, conference notices, project deadlines, and funding searches.

That is what makes the UNC Water & Health Substack worth following.

Its first issue moves from contaminated cleansing water in Nepal to antimicrobial resistance in Ghana, from private wells in Pennsylvania to failing sanitation systems in Alabama. It connects those studies with conferences where the next conversations will occur and organizations that may fund the next generation of research and practice.