In the South African context, upgrading to, and delivery of a basic water-supply service to
small-community households is expected to bring benefits such as reduced exposure to
contaminated drinking water. A basic water-supply service mostly means that water is
distributed to the community via communal taps that are not on the households’ premises
(DWA, 2003). While this is seen as an improvement, people still have to use plastic
containers (mostly 20-25ℓ volume) to collect water from the taps and store in their houses
(Nala et al., 2003). Authors report that, from a health-related microbial water quality
perspective, the management (e.g. poor container-hygiene practices) of household
containers cause microbial re-contamination of good quality water (Gundry et al., 2004;
Jagals et al., 2004; Jensen et al., 2002). This implies that household container water pose a
risk of microbial infection to an individual if used for drinking without any household level
disinfection. Providing clean water to households, even thought they might still have to use
the containers, does limit the extent of the recontamination because of consistent use with
the clean water as opposed to when communities use these containers to source
contaminated surface waters (Mokoena et al., 2010). When the supply system fails, which
was reported to happen frequently in the study area (Rietveld et al., 2009), the affected
communities will return to their original source of water, using the same containers to collect what is often contaminated water (Momba et al., 2006).
While it is plausible that the probable risk of infection will change with these service
inconsistencies, it has not conclusively been shown what the effect of it might be on risk. This
submission demonstrates how a quantitative microbial risk assessment (WHO, 2004) can be
used as a tool to assess these shifts in risk, offering another technique to assess the
effectiveness of a small-community water supply service.
The aim of the study was assess, after implementation with subsequent operation and
maintenance of two small-community water supply schemes, the effect of service delivery on
the annual risk of bacterial infection for individuals based on pathogenic E. coli in the water
that the people in the community drink.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:tut/oai:encore.tut.ac.za:d1001095 |
| Date | 18 April 2010 |
| Creators | Mokoena, MM, Jagal, P |
| Publisher | Tshwane University of Technology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | |
| Rights | Tshwane University of Technology, |
| Relation | Water Institute of South Africa |
Page generated in 0.0029 seconds