Monitoring Bathing Waters -a Practical Guide to the Design and Implementation of Assessments and Monitoring Programmes Edited Chapter 9*: Approaches to Microbiological Monitoring 9.1 Issues 9.1.1 Current Regulatory Schemes

* This chapter represents the conclusions of a meeting of experts organised by WHO in cooperation with the US EPA and held in Annapolis, MD, USA, in November 1998 (for further details, see the Acknowledgements section). The US EPA has not conducted a policy and legal evaluation of this chapter. Despite evident successes in the protection of public health, present approaches to the regulation of recreational water quality suffer several limitations. A modified approach to regulation of recreational water quality could provide for improved protection of public health with the minimum necessary monitoring effort and could provide greater scope for interventions, especially for those within the resources of local authorities. This chapter describes the principal issues discussed at a meeting of experts, who concluded that such an alternative was possible and should be tested and promoted. Recreational water standards have had some success in driving cleanups, increasing public awareness, contributing to informed personal choice and contributing to a public health benefit. These successes are difficult to quantify, but the need to control and minimise adverse health effects has been the principal concern of regulation. Present regulatory schemes for the microbiological quality of recreational water are primarily or exclusively based on percentage compliance with faecal indicator counts. Examples of compliance criteria currently in use are given in Table 9.1. A number of constraints are evident in the current standards and guidelines: • Management actions are retrospective and can only be deployed after human exposure to the hazard. • The risk to health is primarily from human excreta, the traditional indicators of which may also derive from other sources. • There is poor inter-laboratory and international comparability of microbiological analytical data.