Risk Management for Safe Drinking Water

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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.**