A principal objective of water supply and sanitation programs is to improve the health of the community. This not only reduces human suffering, but also enables economic gains to be made. The Mirzapur study is important because it substantiates a fundamental assumption on which much water and sanitation policy is based: that improvements in water supply and sanitation have a postitive impact on community health. It is particularly significant that the impact was demonstrated in rural Bangladesh, in spite of the fact that most households are within a few minutes ' walk of an alternative water source, however polluted, but that individual connections are not an affordable level of water supply service. Very significant health benefits were achieved by an integrated package of handpumps, latrines, and hygiene education. However, it is not clear to what extent these benefits could have been achieved by those three components individually, or at lower levels of provision. The project demonstrated the feasibility and operational advantages of the integrated approach in which water supply, sanitation, and hygiene education are combined. The hygiene education component helped to ensure the use of the handpumps and acceptance of the latrines, and at the same time its messages could not have been put into practice without them.