The research in this theme addressed the provision of safe drinking water from two perspectives: assessing and protecting source water quality, and developing and evaluating improved treatment and distribution methods. Many agencies have begun to look at source water protection as a cost-effective way of achieving improved water quality at the tap.

These research projects studied source water quality by assessing the impact of watershed management, with particular emphasis on municipal effluents and agricultural activities on the incidence of enteric disease.

Safe drinking water projects

• Agriculture, ecology and urban/industrial activities — cause and effect associations in the occurrence of waterborne pathogens, led by Dr. James Byrne, Department of Geography, University of Lethbridge
• Improving disinfection process controls for pathogen inactivation through the use of integrated disinfection design framework and standardized bench-scale assays, led by Dr. Raymond Desjardins, Department of Civil, Geological and Mining Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal
• Innovative methods for the detection of pathogens and evaluation of the fecal indexes of microbial pollution, led by Dr. Pierre Payment, INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier
• Molecular-based detection of waterborne pathogens: Cryptosporidium parvum, co-led by Dr. Hung Lee and Dr. Jack Trevors, Department of Environmental Biology, University of Guelph
• Pathogen loading at drinking water intakes on a heavily impacted river: assessing urban and agricultural inputs, led by Dr. Peter Huck, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Waterloo