Review of health outcome targets adopted worldwide for assessing the microbiological safety of drinking water

Abstract

Around the world, countries are moving towards health-based targets for assuring the microbiological safety of drinking water. The status of these developments is reviewed in this report. It shows the adoption of the Disability Adjusted Life Year in several countries as a metric for assessing safety although the level of risk infection is preferred elsewhere. Implementation does, however, require knowledge of the pathogen burden in source waters and, for practical application during water treatment, quantitative microbial risk assessment has been used to convert these targets to required pathogen elimination credits. No standard framework was found to be available for conducting this exercise and different approaches have been used which vary in their complexity. If a suitable framework was adopted, UK water companies could benefit from such an approach as a means of demonstrating pathogen removal.

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