Risk Management for Safe Drinking Water

该研究计划将通过关注实际风险评估，风险管理和风险理解的方法，解决与实现和确保向消费者提供安全饮用水有关的一些关键问题。饮用水质量对人类健康构成的最重要的风险是微生物病原体，必须通过适当的水处理，特别是消毒来减少。然而，所有化学消毒过程都会产生不需要的消毒副产物，这可能会造成公共卫生风险-这是我研究的主要重点（贡献#1，2）。一种重要的新的分析方法，用于表征以前未识别和未报告的污染物，已与我的合作者（贡献#4）。这一新的进展将在一个单独的、最近资助的、互补的项目中开发，该项目仅限于消毒副产品。我的研究计划将受益于这一重大分析进展的创造，但特别是要解决更广泛的理解风险的问题。我建议解决普遍存在的误解，但可以忽略的健康风险，与大量的超痕量化合物在饮用水中的水平低于那些通常识别或检测到的水。我们的新方法为提供与“纯净”水相关的神话的证据开辟了令人兴奋的新可能性，因为我们现在有工具证明，即使是最原始的水源也不可避免地含有大量化合物，但这种“现实”并不对消费者构成有意义的健康风险。通过我们2014年AWWA新书的研究证明，饮用水安全计划已被国际公认为提高小型系统消费者安全的最佳途径。许多水安全计划方法的一个关键要素是使用某种手段来评估风险，最常见的是使用通用风险矩阵。我们已经评估了这种方法准确评估一系列风险的能力，面对理论上的批评，这种方法可以提供“比无用更糟糕”的结果。鉴于这种技术在许多风险管理领域（不仅仅是饮用水安全）中的广泛采用，我将扩展我们的初步研究，以提供基于证据的实用和切实的指导，以提高这些实用风险管理技术的意义和价值。具体而言，我将超越我们对基于加拿大公共卫生署传染病风险证据的风险矩阵（贡献#3）的研究，研究其他可获得的风险证据来源，以挑战风险矩阵的能力。我们将开发的新见解将用于改进可提供给一线人员的实用指导，这些人员需要实用和有意义的工具来评估饮用水风险。

This research program will address some key issues related to achieving and ensuring delivery of safe drinking water to consumers through a focus on approaches to practical risk assessment, risk management and risk comprehension. The most important health risk for humans posed by drinking water quality is that posed by microbial pathogens which must be reduced by adequate water treatment, particularly disinfection. However, all chemical disinfection processes produce unwanted disinfection byproducts which which may pose a public health risk - a major focus of my research (Contribution #1,2).******An important new analytical approach for characterizing previously unidentified and unreported contaminants has been demonstrated with my collaborators (Contribution #4). This new advance will be developed in a separate, recently-funded, complementary project that is limited to disinfection byproducts. My research program will benefit from the creation of this major analytical advance, but specifically to address much broader issues of understanding risk. I propose to address the widespread misunderstanding about the presence, but negligible health risk, associated with large numbers of ultra-trace compounds in drinking water at levels below those normally recognized or detected in water. Our new approach opens exciting new possibilities for providing evidence about the myths associated with “pure” water because we now have the tools to demonstrate that inevitably, even the most pristine water sources will contain large numbers of compounds, yet this “reality” does not constitute a meaningful health risk to consumers.******Drinking water safety plans as demonstrated through research for our new 2014 AWWA book have come to be internationally recognized as the best way to improve consumer safety for small systems. A key element of many of the water safety plan approaches has been to use some means to assess risk, most commonly through the use of generic risk matrices. We have evaluated the ability of this approach to accurately assess a range of risks in the face of theoretical criticisms that this approach can provide results that are "worse than useless". Given the widespread adoption of this technique in many fields of risk management, not just drinking water safety, I will expand on our initial study to provide practical and tangible guidance, that is evidence-based, to improve the meaning and value of these practical risk management techniques. Specifically, I will move beyond our study on risk matrices (Contribution #3) based on infectious disease risk evidence from the Public Health Agency of Canada to study other accessible sources of risk evidence with which to challenge the capabilities of the risk matrix. The new insights we will develop will be used to improve the practical guidance which can be offered to front-line personnel who require practical and meaningful tools to assess drinking water risks.**