Risk Management for Safe Drinking Water

这项研究计划将通过重点关注实际风险评估、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。饮用水水质对人类构成的最重要的健康风险是微生物病原体，必须通过适当的水处理，特别是消毒来减少这些病原体。然而，所有化学消毒过程都会产生不需要的消毒副产品，这可能会对公共健康构成风险--这是我研究的一个主要重点(贡献#1，2)。 与我的合作者一起展示了一种重要的新分析方法，用于表征以前未确认和未报告的污染物(贡献#4)。这一新的进展将在一个单独的、最近资助的、仅限于消毒副产品的补充项目中开发。我的研究计划将受益于这一重大分析进步的创造，但具体是为了解决更广泛的风险理解问题。我建议解决人们普遍存在的误解，即饮用水中大量超痕量化合物的水平低于通常在水中识别或检测到的水平，这是存在的，但健康风险可以忽略不计。我们的新方法开启了令人兴奋的新可能性，为提供与“纯净”水相关的神话提供证据，因为我们现在有工具来证明，即使是最原始的水源也不可避免地会含有大量化合物，但这一“现实”并不会对消费者构成重大的健康风险。 我们2014年AWWA新书的研究表明，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方式。许多水安全计划办法的一个关键要素是使用一些手段来评估风险，最常见的是通过使用通用风险矩阵。我们评估了这种方法在面对理论批评的情况下准确评估一系列风险的能力，这些批评认为这种方法可能会产生“比无用更糟糕的结果”。鉴于这种技术被广泛应用于许多风险管理领域，而不仅仅是饮用水安全，我将对我们的初步研究进行扩展，以提供实际和有形的指导，即以证据为基础，以提高这些实用的风险管理技术的意义和价值。具体地说，我将超越我们基于加拿大公共卫生机构传染病风险证据的风险矩阵研究(贡献3)，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向需要实用和有意义的工具来评估饮用水风险的前线人员提供的实际指导。

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.