Ensuring safe drinking water: converting commitment into action and foresight

Abstract

Ensuring safe drinking water: converting commitment into action and foresight INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY20 years have passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) published its third edition of Guidelines for Drinkingwater Quality (WHO 2004), a major advance in the guidance for water-providers to ensure safe drinking water. This advance was the product of more than a decade of international discussion about how to better prevent contamination of drinking water by adopting a preventive risk management approach. The prevailing perspectives about ensuring safe drinking water in the 1990s had been dominated by a primary focus on setting and meeting quantitative limits for an expanding list of water contaminants monitored in finished drinking water. This approach is inherently reactive rather than preventive because treated water monitoring is not continuous for most contaminants and results are normally not available until after the drinking water has been consumed. Drinking water guidelines needed to be restructured to provide a fundamentally preventive risk management approach developed to achieve health-based targets. Those guidelines also needed to establish a more realistic balance for microbial pathogens versus chemical contaminants. That balance needed to recognize the substantial and certain evidence that pathogens in drinking water cause adverse human health outcomes versus the much more uncertain evidence for most chemical contaminants. The latter mainly warrant control from a precautionary public health perspective rather than the certain drinking water health risks of pathogens confirmed by experience.An early influential proposal to improve the capability of drinking water guidelines was provided by Havelaar (1994) suggesting a risk management approach for drinking water guidelines modeled on what had been adopted internationally for food safety. This approach was pursued by some European nations (e.g., Iceland, Switzerland). Dr. Jamie Bartram, in charge of the WHO drinking water guidelines program sought adoption of a risk management approach and led a major international effort to address improvements that was addressed by a 1999 expert meeting in Stockholm where foundational concepts for water safety plans (WSPs) were developed (Bartram et al. 2001;Deere et al. 2001). Meanwhile, Australia was also pursuing a risk and total quality management-oriented restructuring of its national drinking water guidelines after the 1998 'Sydney Water Crisis' (Clancy 2000) by means of a working group established by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) from 1999 to 2002 (Rizak et al. 2003). These parallel initiatives led to a week-long joint meeting of the WHO expert group with the NHMRC working group in Adelaide in May 2001 to compare their respective risk management approaches. These activities also led the founders of the Global Water Research Coalition (https:// globalwaterresearchcoalition.net) to initiate the creation of the Bonn Network that resulted in the 2004 Bonn Charter for S...