Water quality, increasingly recognized for its significant impact on health, is garnering heightened attention. Previous studies were limited by the number of water quality indicators and the duration of analysis. This study assessed the drinking water quality and its associated health risk in suburban areas of Wuhan, a city in central China, from 2016 to 2021. We collected 368 finished water samples and 1090 tap water samples and tested these for 37 different indicators. The water quality was evaluated using the water quality index, with trends over time analyzed via the Mann-Kendall test. Furthermore, an artificial neural network model was employed for future water quality prediction. Our findings indicated that the water quality in rural Wuhan was generally good and had an improvement from 2016 to 2021. The qualification and excellent rates were 98.91% and 86.81% for finished water, and 97.89% and 78.07% for tap water, respectively. The drinking water quality was predicted to maintain satisfactory in 2022 and 2023. Additionally, principal component analysis revealed that the primary sanitary issues in the water were poor sensory properties, elevated metal contents, high levels of dissolved solids, and microbial contamination. These issues were likely attributable to domestic and industrial waste discharge and aging water pipelines. The health risks associated with the long-term consumption of this water have been steadily decreasing over the years, underscoring the effectiveness of Wuhan\'s ongoing water management efforts.

The occurrence of diarrheal infections depends on the level of water and sanitation services available to households of immunocompromised individuals and children of less than five years old. It is therefore of paramount importance for immunocompromised individuals to be supplied with safe drinking water for better health outcomes. The current study aimed at ascertaining the probability of infection that Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Shigella dysenteriae, Vibrio cholerae, and rotavirus might cause to rural dwellers as compared to urban dwellers. Both culture-based and molecular-based methods were used to confirm the presence of target microorganisms in drinking water samples, while Beta-Poisson and exponential models were used to determine the health risk assessment. Results revealed the presence of all targeted organisms in drinking water. The estimated health risks for single ingestion of water for the test pathogens were as follows: 1.6 × 10-7 for S. typhimurium, 1.79 × 10-4 for S. dysenteriae, 1.03 × 10-3 for V. cholerae, 2.2 × 10-4 for E. coli O157:H7, and 3.73 × 10-2 for rotavirus. The general quantitative risk assessment undertaken in this study suggests that constant monitoring of household container-stored water supplies is vital as it would assist in early detection of microbial pathogens. Moreover, it will also allow the prompt action to be taken for the protection of public health, particularly for immunocompromised individuals and children who are prone to higher risk of infections.

This study assessed potential human health hazards posed by drinking water from centralized water supply systems in rural You County, along with its spatial distribution. While most previous studies have focused on source water or urban drinking water, this study evaluated the health risk posed by 20 common pollutants (arsenic, cadmium, chromium(VI), lead, mercury, selenium, cyanide, fluoride, nitrate nitrogen, trichloromethane, tetrachloromethane, chlorite, aluminum, iron, manganese, copper, zinc, ammonia nitrogen, chlorine dioxide, and volatile phenols) in rural terminal tap water. The assessment adopted the model recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and was combined with the geographic information system (GIS) analysis to explore the spatial distribution of risk factors. Water samples were collected from 13 townships in You County across four quarters of 2019. The results indicated that the average carcinogenic risk of the rural drinking water was 2.45 × 10-5, ranging from 1.80 × 10-5 to 3.89 × 10-5, which never exceeded the maximum acceptable range recommended by the US EPA (1.0 × 10-4 ~ 1.0 × 10-6). The average hazard index (HI), which reflects noncarcinogenic risk levels, was 0.75 and ranged from 0.34 to 1.74. Throughout the year, some townships presented HI > 1, indicating a non-carcinogenic risk. The GIS analysis indicated that noncarcinogenic risks were mainly distributed in the north, followed by the east and west. This is generally consistent with the spatial distribution of chlorite concentrations, which contribute most strongly to noncarcinogenic risk levels. The northern You County should therefore be prioritized for health risk control, followed by the eastern and western regions. Chlorite is the priority pollutant for control.

The availability of safe drinking water in sub-Saharan countries remains a major challenge because poor sanitation has been the cause of various outbreaks of waterborne disease due to the poor microbiological quality of water used for domestic purposes. The faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) used in the present study included Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Enterococcus (ENT). FIB and aerobic mesophilic bacteria (AMB) were quantified during July 2015 (dry season) and November 2015 (rainy season) in order to assess the quality of drinking water from wells (n=3; P1-P3), and two rivers, the River Lukemi (RLK, n=3) and River Luini (RLN, n=2) in the city of Kikwit, which is located in the province of Kwilu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kikwit is well known for its outbreaks of persistent and recurrent waterborne diseases including Entamoeba, Shigella, typhoid fever, cholera, and Ebola Viral Hemorrhagic Fever. Consequently, E. coli, ENT, and AMB were quantified in water samples according to the standard international methods for water quality determination using the membrane filtration method. The FIB characterization was performed for human-specific Bacteroides by PCR using specific primers. The results obtained revealed high FIB concentrations in river samples collected during both seasons. For example, E. coli respectively reached 4.3×104 and 9.2×104 CFU 100mL-1 in the dry season and the wet season. ENT reached 5.3×103 CFU 100mL-1 during the dry season and 9.8×103 CFU 100mL-1 in the wet season. The pollution was significantly worse in the wet season compared to the dry season. Surprisingly, no faecal contamination was observed in well water samples collected in the dry season while E. coli and ENT were detected in all wells in the wet season with values of 6, 7, and 11CFUmL-1 for E. coli in wells P1-P3, respectively and 3, 5, 9 CFU mL-1for ENT in the same wells. Interestingly, the PCR assays for human-specific Bacteroides HF183/HF134 indicated that 97-100% captured in all analyses of isolated FIB were of human origin. The results indicate that contamination of E. coli, ENT, and AMB in the studied water resources increases during the wet season. This study improves understanding of the microbiological pollution of rivers and wells under tropical conditions and will guide future municipal/local government decisions on improving water quality in this region which is characterised by persistent and recurrent waterborne diseases. Although the epidemiology can be geographically localised, the effects of cross border transmission can be global. Therefore, the research results presented in this article form recommendations to municipalities/local authorities and the approach and procedures can be carried out in a similar environment.

Human health is greatly affected by inadequate access to sufficient and safe drinking water, especially in low and middle-income countries. Drinking water governance improvements may be one way to better drinking water quality. Over the past decade, many projects and international organizations have been dedicated to water governance; however, water governance in the drinking water sector is understudied and how to improve water governance remains unclear. We analyze drinking water governance challenges in three countries-Brazil, Ecuador, and Malawi-as perceived by government, service providers, and civil society organizations. A mixed methods approach was used: a clustering model was used for country selection and qualitative semi-structured interviews were used with direct observation in data collection. The clustering model integrated political, economic, social and environmental variables that impact water sector performance, to group countries. Brazil, Ecuador and Malawi were selected with the model so as to enhance the generalizability of the results. This comparative case study is important because similar challenges are identified in the drinking water sectors of each country; while, the countries represent diverse socio-economic and political contexts, and the selection process provides generalizability to our results. We find that access to safe water could be improved if certain water governance challenges were addressed: coordination and data sharing between ministries that deal with drinking water services; monitoring and enforcement of water quality laws; and sufficient technical capacity to improve administrative and technical management of water services at the local level. From an analysis of our field research, we also developed a conceptual framework that identifies policy levers that could be used to influence governance of drinking water quality on national and sub-national levels, and the relationships between these levers.