Employing indicator-based geostatistics and quantitative microbial risk analysis to assess the health risks of groundwater use for household demands on the Pingtung Plain, Taiwan

This study used indicator kriging (IK) and quantitative microbial risk analysis (QMRA) to assess the health risks of using groundwater for household cleaning and horticultural irrigation on the Pingtung Plain. First, IK was employed to determine the conditional cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of groundwaterEscherichia coli (E. coli). Nonparametric Monte Carlo simulation based on established CCDF was then adopted to characterize the distributions and uncertainty of groundwaterE. coli. Finally, QMRA was employed to determine health risks of groundwater use for household cleaning and horticultural irrigation, and the 95th percentiles of the risk distributions were calculated to obtain a representative risk. The study results indicated that the health risks of groundwater use ranged from 3.95  × 10−5 to 2.49  × 10−2 infections/user/year and exceeded the acceptable level, 1  × 10−4 infections/user/year, in most of the aquifers. Accordingly, residents of this plain should not directly extract groundwater for use in daily life.
Source: Environmental Geochemistry and Health - Category: Environmental Health Source Type: research