Testing for Presence of E.Coli and Coliforms in Varanasi, India

Presenter: Zoe Baber, Environmental Science, Global Public Health Scholars

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For my practicum I traveled to Varanasi, India with Public Health Beyond Borders. We did many different things on our trip including conducting needs assessments, first aid workshops, water quality research, and spoke at a conference about our club. My practicum poster mainly focused on the water quality aspect of our trip as it relates clearly to my major and interests. I got to know the families whose water quality we were testing, and was both surprised and grateful for their incredible hospitality. This made the results of the water quality testing even more impactful - we weren't just dealing with numbers, but real people with their own families, personalities, stories, etc. This is another one of my takeaways that I will carry with me as I learn more public health statistics and interventions. This connects clearly to public health as we had to design and implement interventions. Another skill that I strengthened was cultural competency. Given that our interventions took place in a country on the other side of the world with a very unique and rich culture, we had to take the difference in culture into account with our interventions. For example, at one of our club's general body meetings we got to "demo" our first aid intervention. At the time we mentioned that you could do CPR to the beat of Staying Alive, and then one faculty member asked if there was a popular Indian song with the same beat. We came up with Maahi Ve which we played on a speaker during our workshop, and the kids seemed to really enjoy it and better connect with our workshop. mote awareness of airborne illness risks in the UMD community and contributed to real-time monitoring that can inform public health responses. Being part of the PHAB Lab has shown me the value of research in shaping safer and healthier environments.