When Christine Moe graduated from college, she spent two years as a VISTA volunteer in a coal mining town deep within the Appalachian Mountains. With only one small sewage treatment plant serving 5,000 residents, Moe remembers seeing toilet paper draping the bushes beside a narrow creek that ran between the houses and the railroad tracks. The creek was filthy. "That was my first real exposure to problems of water and inadequate sanitation," she recalls.

Today Moe, an Associate Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health and the Director of Emory's Center for Global Safe Water, leads an international team of researchers, graduate students, engineers, and community planners in tackling enduring public health problems at the intersection of water, sanitation, and hygiene. "Lack of access and lack of sustainability are the big issues that propel our work forward," she says. What happens, for example, when a village's newly installed sanitation facilities malfunction or are not used properly? Moe has discovered brand new latrines being used to store grain and wastewater treatment plants left idle because of a broken pump. In such conditions, infectious diseases can run rampant, ravaging a community. "What drives me on is what I see," she says.

And what she sees is shocking. An estimated 5000 children die each day from preventable water-borne sanitation-related diseases. An astounding forty percent of the world's population lives without access to sanitary facilities. "Studying toilets is not very fashionable," says Moe. "But sanitation and water are fundamental to public health."

The United Nations has declared 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation. Moe and her team are capitalizing on this broader effort, whose objective is to accelerate progress on sanitation in order to save lives and foster economic and social development. Despite growing awareness of the importance of proper sanitation, gains in this area have been slow. Some non-profit organizations and charities lack the technical expertise to install donated sanitation facilities properly. Some latrines, in turn, prove ineffective at killing pathogens. Moe's work includes a partnership with UNICEF in El Salvador, where scientists are testing composting latrines for their ability to kill pathogens. In Bolivia, she and her team are conducting focus groups to discern what sanitation facilities best meet the needs of local residents. "Not all latrines are equal," she says. Working with engineers from Georgia Tech, Moe and her colleagues are training Bolivians to build and then sell their own fiberglass toilets. High-quality latrines are not just good for hygiene; they are also good for business.

Closer to home, Moe oversees a microbiology laboratory at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, where she studies a group of pathogens known as noroviruses, which cause what we think of as the stomach flu. These viruses can persist for hours on surfaces such as kitchen counters, and Moe's research has found that they can survive a remarkable 60 days in water. Some hand sanitizers are effective against them, while others are not. In a series of recent studies, Moe has shown that the hand-sanitizing products commonly used in restaurants and healthcare settings are not very effective in killing the norovirus. "This is very practical, very applicable research," she says.

Moe is also assessing the state of metropolitan Atlanta's water. Working with officials in Gwinnett County, she is testing a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant for its capacity to remove viral pathogens from Lake Lanier. In a separate project, she is studying the condition of Atlanta's water pipes. More specifically, Moe and her team are examining the effect of water's residence time in distribution pipes on the number of emergency department visits for gastrointestinal ailments in a given neighborhood. Says Moe: "In the United States, in big cities, we have good water treatment, but then once it is treated and goes out into the pipes, the distribution system becomes a public health issue." Older water—or water that has been sitting in the pipes for days—is associated with more GI-related emergency room visits than is younger water, which is pumped through the distribution system faster.

These wide-ranging researches require an interdisciplinary team of collaborators. At the Center for Global Safe Water, Moe partners with Georgia Tech, CARE, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Carter Center. The Center for Global Safe Water is the only consortium of its kind—a multidisciplinary program that brings together academic, government, and non-governmental workers to confront the world's water crises. In the Rollins School of Public Health, Moe trains and supports summer interns who work on sanitation and hygiene across the world, from Malawi and Ghana to Haiti and China. She also relies on a strong team of staff members who serve as international liaisons between local residents and visiting scholars and engineers. Moe is particularly proud of her partnership with Georgia Tech students, who are helping design new latrines with solar panels for improved composting.

Moe, who joined the Emory faculty in 2000, sometimes refers to herself as the "Water Woman," indicating her work with the Center for Global Safe Water. Yet the trajectory of her scholarship has a broader reach. Clean water is impossible without good sanitation—and without good sanitation, hygiene becomes difficult. Moe appreciates Emory's embrace of multi-disciplinary solutions to these interrelated problems. And she is grateful for the friends and colleagues she has made in the process. "I can walk over to Goizueta Business School and talk to colleagues there about setting up small businesses in Bolivia," she says. "There is an extraordinary opportunity at Emory to walk down the street and talk to colleagues in other parts of the university."