OBJECTIVE To determine how data on water source quality affect assessments of progress towards the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target on access to safe drinking-water. METHODS Data from five countries on whether drinking-water sources complied with World Health Organization water quality guidelines on contamination with thermotolerant coliform bacteria, arsenic, fluoride and nitrat...

BACKGROUND More than 60,000,000 Bangladeshis are drinking water with unsafe concentrations of one or more elements. OBJECTIVES Our aims in this study were to evaluate and improve the drinking water testing and treatment plans for western Bangladesh. METHODS We sampled groundwater from four neighborhoods in western Bangladesh to determine the distributions of arsenic, boron, barium, chromium...

The majority of the world's population still live without access to healthy water and the contamination of drinking water with protozoan pathogens poses a serious threat to millions of people in the developing world. Even in the developed world periodic outbreaks of diarrhoeal diseases are caused by the protozoan parasites Cryptosporidium sp., Giardia duodenalis and Entamoeba histolytica. Thus,...

The development of technologies for the provision of clean and plentiful supplies of freshwater has been a central feature of successful civilizations. In advanced economies, we have grown to assume that the tap at home will always provide as much as we want of clean drinking water. Rapid economic development and population growth globally, in particular in cities, are hugely expanding expectat...

Despite shortcomings, boiling is the most common means of treating water at home and the benchmark against which emerging point-of-use water treatment approaches are measured. In a 5-month study, we assessed the microbiological effectiveness and cost of the practice among 218 self-reported boilers relying on unprotected water supplies. Boiling was associated with a 99% reduction in geometric me...

BACKGROUND Drinking water contaminated by wastewater is a potential source of exposure to mammary carcinogens and endocrine disrupting compounds from commercial products and excreted natural and pharmaceutical hormones. These contaminants are hypothesized to increase breast cancer risk. Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has a history of wastewater contamination in many, but not all, of its public water ...

There is limited information on the prevalence of the potent mutagen 3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-2(5H)-furanone (MX) in U.S. water supplies. We measured MX concentrations and mutagenic activity in tap water samples from 36 surface water systems throughout Massachusetts. We found MX levels much higher (up to 80 ng/L) than previously reported in the United States. We also evaluated the ...