Journal
SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
Volume 750, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141284
Keywords
Groundwater; Water quality; Faecal contamination; Microbial risk assessment; Drinking water; Thermotolerant coliforms
Categories
Funding
- SCENARIO NERC Doctoral Training Partnership Grant [NE/L002566/1]
- REACH programme research grant - UK Aid from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) [201880]
- NERC, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
- Department for International Development (DFID) through Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor (UPGro) Consortium, Hidden Crisis Project [NE/M008606/1]
- Natural Environment Research Council as part of the SUNRISE programme delivering National Capability [NE/R000131/1]
- NERC [NE/R000131/1, NE/M008606/1, bgs06003] Funding Source: UKRI
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Regular monitoring of drinking water quality is crucial to prevent waterborne diseases. Testing for microbial contamination is important, especially in low-resource settings. Tryptophan-like fluorescence (TLF) shows potential as a rapid method for detecting microbial contamination in drinking water sources.
Regularmonitoring of drinking water quality is vital to identify contamination of potablewater supplies. Testing for microbial contamination is important to prevent transmission of waterborne disease, but establishing and maintaining a water quality monitoring programme requires sustained labour, consumables and resources. In low resource settings such as developing countries, this can prove difficult, but measuring microbial contamination is listed as a requirement of reaching the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 6 for water and sanitation. A nine-month water quality monitoring programme was conducted in rural Malawi to assess the suitability of tryptophan-like fluorescence (TLF), an emerging method for rapidly detecting microbial contamination, as a drinking water quality monitoring tool. TLF data was compared with thermotolerant coliforms (TTCs, E. coli) and inorganic hydrochemical parameters. A large (n= 235) temporal datasetwas collected fromfive groundwater drinking water sources, with samples collected once or twice weekly depending on the season. The results show that TLF can indicate a broader contamination risk but is not as sensitive to short term variability when compared to other faecal indicators. This is likely due to a broad association of TLF with elevated DOC concentrations from a range of different sources. Elevated TLF may indicate preferential conditions for the persistence of TTCs and/or E. coli, but not necessarily a public health risk from microbial contamination. TLF is therefore a more precautionary risk indicator than microbial culturing techniques and could prove useful as a high-level screening tool for initial risk assessment. Forwidespread use of TLF to be successful, standardisation of TLF values associated with different levels of risk is required, however, this study highlights the difficulties of equating TLF thresholds to TTCs or E. coli data because of the influence of DOC/HLF on the TLF signal. (C) 2020 British Geological Survey, a component body of UKRI. [BGS (c) UKRI 2020. All Rights Reserved]. Published by Elsevier B.V.
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