Laboratory Development and Field Testing of Sentinel Toys to Assess Environmental Faecal Exposure of Young Children in Rural India

This paper by Torondel et al. (2015), published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, investigates the suitability of different approaches for using sentinel toys as method of assessing young children’s exposure to faecal pathogens in households in low-income settings. It concludes that sentinel toys may offer an effective tool for measuring faecal contamination in a domestic environment, but that further research is required to demonstrate the reliability and sensitivity of sentinel toys and to optimize the procedures for using them.