Two new guideline technical documents for Canadian Drinking Water Quality are now available on Health Canada's website.
As drinking water professionals we have turned our attention to the latest potential threats including for example microplastics, perfluorinated compounds, and cyanobacterial toxins.
Hi all…with spring just around the corner, for some of us anyway, an interesting paper entitled “Persistence of fecal contamination and pathogenic Escherichia coli O157:H7 in snow and snowmelt” has recently been published. There has been a substantial amount of research conducted in the area of watershed protection as a key element in the production of safe drinking [...]
There have been a number of studies which have been unable to link the risk of certain cancers with trihalomethanes (THMs) in drinking water over the past couple of decades. In a just published review, the authors examined trends in the incidence of bladder cancer in 8 countries in the 45 years since THMs were detected in chlorinated drinking water...
Lest we forget the lessons the May 2000 Walkerton E. coli/Campylobacter outbreak (in which seven people died, and more than 2,300 became ill) taught us I thought I’d circulate a report of a very similar animal wastewater intrusion into groundwater event that occurred in 2017 leading to a campylobacteriosis outbreak...
I came across what could be a very important article today which may not attract the attention of drinking water professionals as it has just been published in the CDCs Emerging Infectious Diseases journal which isn’t widely read in our circles. It identifies a relationship between Mycobacterium avium complex in humans and premise plumbing.
I learned today what ‘poikilothermic animals’ are (those with body temperatures that vary with the ambient environmental temperature, such as fish, frogs, and snails) and why, as drinking water professionals, we should care.
If you are like me you probably wonder why pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) is being suggested by authors of this just published paper as a viral indicator (surrogate) for fecal contamination in water (instead of enteric viruses, adenoviruses or noroviruses).
In an effort to avoid chlorinated disinfection byproduct (DBP) formation in distribution systems many drinking water utilities switched from free chlorine to chloramination.
It is widely assumed that an important waterborne pathogen, Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7, is shed from warm blooded animals and in some instances is transported to a drinking water treatment plant intake/source.