engleski

Emerging contaminants: A new challenge for drinking-water quality standards

Water is essential to life, but drinking water can contain harmful contaminants which can significantly affect the health of individuals and/or communities. Therefore, in order to protect the public health, the drinking-water quality is strict-ly regulated by international guidelines and national regulations. Guidelines and regulations describes the microbiological, chemical and indicator parameters that must be monitored and tested regularly, from catchment to consumers tap, max-imum permissible levels of monitored parameters and instructions for preventive risk management approaches. Beside above mentioned, guidelines and regula-tions also provided the mechanisms for independent surveillance and control of drinking-water quality in order to ensure that national standards have been met. However, despite the guidelines and regulations, the drinking-water quality is still worldwide issue, and numerous incidences of waterborne diseases still have been reported each year. The new challenge for international drinking-water quality experts and national regulators presents so called emerging pollutants. Namely, during the past decades scientists all over the world, using highly sophisticated analytical techniques, de-tected various chemical compounds such as pharmaceuticals, hormones and en-docrine disruptors in the water bodies, which has been used as the source of drink-ing water. Although most of those chemical originate from anthropogenic activi-ties, relevant data of their effect to human health is still unknown. This paper discusses the new issues in definition, determination and achieving of drinking-water quality related with occurrence of emerging contaminants in the environment and natural waters.

emerging contaminants, drinking-water quality, regulations, water treatments

nije evidentirano