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Volume 30-22 |
INTERNATIONAL NOTESRevised WHO drinking-water guidelines to help prevent water-related outbreaks and diseaseEnsuring drinking-water is safe is a challenge in every part of the world, from water piped into people's homes, to rural wells and water provided to refugee camps in an emergency. Contamination of drinking-water is too often detected only after a health crisis, when people have fallen ill or died as a result of drinking unsafe water. On 21 September 2004, WHO released new recommendations which will help to pre-empt drinking-water contamination. WHO advises national and local drinking-water regulators, and the enterprises and organizations which actually provide drinking-water to 5 billion people around the world, that the challenge of providing safe drinking-water is growing. WHO's updated Guidelines for drinking-water quality(1) will help regulators and water service providers the world over maintain and improve the quality of their drinking-water. The revised guidelines will allow public health management to focus on prevention of microbial and chemical contamination of water supplies. They are as applicable for urban drinking-water systems in North America as for protected wells in the developing world. This new approach exhorts all parties working on drinking-water provision and control to act in such a way that outbreaks of waterborne diseases can be further reduced. Traditionally, drinking-water regulations have emphasized testing water samples for levels of chemical and biological contaminants. Relying on this approach means that problems are detected long after water is consumed - a remedial rather than preventive approach. Outbreaks caused by microbes in drinking-water can affect hundreds of thousands of people. In recent years, communities large and small in some of the world's most developed countries have been affected by contaminated drinking-water. Disease outbreaks caused by E. coli O157 and Campylobacter in Canada, or by Cryptosporidium in the United States, Japan and France as recently as this month, show what can happen if vigilance is not maintained. The hepatitis E outbreak currently sweeping through internally displaced persons camps in Darfur (Sudan) and refugee camps in neighbouring Chad is one example of how waterborne disease affects poor and disadvantaged populations. These new guidelines on drinking-water quality include new guidance on their application in specific settings such as emergencies and disasters. The updated guidelines represent a paradigm shift in advice on how to manage the provision of drinking-water, both in the developed and developing world, in large urban settings and in rural areas or villages. Henceforth, according to the revised guidelines, the recommended approach for regulators and operators is to manage drinking-water quality in a holistic, systematic fashion from source to tap. This includes ensuring water reservoirs or local wells are not at risk of contamination from human and animal waste, to checking basics such as the regular changing of water filters. According to the International Water Association, this third edition of the Guidelines for drinking-water quality is the most significant water-related public health development since the introduction of chlorine, The guidelines' requirement for drinking-water safety plans should be incorporated in regulations across the world. The new edition has reviewed and revised the recommended values for chemical limits in drinking-water in line with the latest scientific evidence. It also reconfirms guideline values for over 100 chemicals. Because routine monitoring for all of the chemicals is not possible, the guidelines set out practical approaches to «rule out» some chemicals and to prioritize others using readily available information. Examples from around the world show how much more of an impact prevention
rather than response can have in maintaining drinking-water quality. These
examples can be found at http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ A list of national technical experts available for interviews and who have
been part of the Technical Committee working on the revision of the guidelines
can be found at http://www.who.int/ mediacentre/news/releases/2004/pr67/ Reference
Source: WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record, Vol 79, No 40, 2004. [Previous] [Table of Contents] [Next]
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