Drinking water turbidity and emergency department visits for gastrointestinal illness in Atlanta, 1993–2004

The extent to which drinking water turbidity measurements indicate the risk of gastrointestinal illness is not well-understood. Despite major advances in drinking water treatment and delivery, infectious disease can still be transmitted through drinking water in the U.S., and it is important to have reliable indicators of microbial water quality to inform public health decisions. The objective of our study was to assess the relationship between gastrointestinal illness, quantified through emergency department visits, and drinking water quality, quantified as raw water and filtered water turbidity measured at the treatment plant

Drinking water residence time in distribution networks and emergency department visits for gastrointestinal illness in Metro Atlanta, Georgia

We examined whether the average water residence time, the time it takes water to travel from the treatment plant to the user, for a zip code was related to the proportion of emergency department (ED) visits for gastrointestinal (GI) illness among residents of that zip code. Individual-level ED data were collected from all hospitals located in the five-county metro Atlanta area from 1993 to 2004. Two of the largest water utilities in the area, together serving 1.7 million people, were considered. People served by these utilities had almost three million total ED visits, 164,937 of them for GI illness. The relationship between water residence time and risk for GI illness was assessed using logistic regression, controlling for potential confounding factors, including patient age and markers of socioeconomic status (SES). We observed a modestly increased risk for GI illness for residents of zip codes with the longest water residence times compared to intermediate residence times (odds ratio (OR) for Utility 1 = 1.07, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.03, 1.10; OR for Utility 2 = 1.05, 95% CI = 1.02, 1.08). The results suggest that drinking water contamination in the distribution system may contribute to the burden of endemic GI illness

An Adaptive Cyberinfrastructure for Threat Management in Urban Water DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Threat management in drinking water distribution systems involves real-time characterization of any contaminant source and plume, design of control strategies, and design of incremental data sampling schedules. This requires dynamic integration of time-varying measurements along with analytical modules that include simulation models, adaptive sampling procedures, and optimization methods. These modules are compute-intensive, requiring multi-level parallel processing via computer clusters. Since real-time responses are critical, the computational needs must also be adaptively matched with available resources. This requires a software system to facilitate this integration via a highperformance computing architecture such that the measurement system, the analytical modules and the computing resources can mutually adapt and steer each other. This paper describes the development of an adaptive cyberinfrastructure system for water distribution threat management facilitated by a dynamic workflow design