BACKGROUND Schistosomiasis is one of the major parasitic diseases in the world in terms of people infected and those at risk. Infection occurs through contact with water contaminated with larval forms of the parasite, which are released by freshwater snails and then penetrate the skin of people. Schistosomiasis infection and human water contact are thus essentially linked, and more knowledge ab...

HYPOTHESIS Droplet wettability and mobility play an important role in dropwise condensation heat transfer. Heat exchangers and heat pipes operate at liquid-vapor saturation. We hypothesize that the wetting behavior of liquid water on microstructures surrounded by pure water vapor differs from that for water droplets in air. EXPERIMENTS The static and dynamic contact angles and contact angle h...

The produced liquid water in cathode catalyst layer (CCL) has significant effect on the operation of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). To investigate this effect, the transport of oxygen in CCL in the presence of immiscible liquid water is studied applying a two-dimensional pore scale model. The CCL was reconstructed as an agglomerated system. To explore the wettability effects, diffe...

Female genital schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by Schistosoma haematobium. Infected females may suffer from symptoms mimicking sexually transmitted infections. We explored if self-reported history of unsafe water contact could be used as a simple predictor of genital schistosomiasis. In a cross-sectional study in rural South Africa, 883 sexually active women aged 16-22 ye...

We report simulation evidence that the structure of the first water layer next to the surface can strongly affect the contact angle of water droplets. Molecular dynamics simulations show that a small uniform strain (± 3%) applied to the lattice constant of a multilayer hydrophilic surface can introduce a marked change in the wetting tendency. In particular, when the lattice constant of a hydrop...

The most common used methods for water disinfection were chemicals like chlorine, ozonation, ultraviolet radiation, membrane processes, etc. Water disinfection using irradiation techniques is new in water treatment industry which has been developed recently. The aim of the present study was to investigate radio frequency (RF) efficiency for the inactivation of total coliform (TC), fecal colifor...

Larvae of the cattle tick Boophilus microplus and all life stages of the European sheep tick Ixodes ricinus avoid walking on a wet membrane surface surrounding a dry patch. Of 170 reactions made at a border with liquid water by 22 B. microplus larvae, 40% consisted of immediate turns to the opposite side to bring all the legs back onto a dry patch, 41% were walks along the border, during which ...