Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water

Environmental Health

Review

Seth H. Frisbie¹  Erika J. Mitchell¹  Bibudhendra Sarkar² 

[1]Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Norwich University, Northfield, VT, USA

[2]Department of Molecular Structure and Function, The Research Institute of The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

[3]Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

关键词: Drinking-water guidelines;    World Health Organization;    Inorganics;    Trace metals;    Public health;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12940-015-0050-7

 received in 2015-06-15, accepted in 2015-07-20,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

The World Health Organization (WHO) has established guidelines for drinking-water quality that cover biological and chemical hazards from both natural and anthropogenic sources. In the most recent edition of Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality (2011), the WHO withdrew, suspended, did not establish, or raised guidelines for the inorganic toxic substances manganese, molybdenum, nitrite, aluminum, boron, nickel, uranium, mercury, and selenium. In this paper, we review these changes to the WHO drinking-water guidelines, examining in detail the material presented in the WHO background documents for each of these toxic substances. In some cases, these WHO background documents use literature reviews that do not take into account scientific research published within the last 10 or more years. In addition, there are instances in which standard WHO practices for deriving guidelines are not used; for example, rounding and other mathematical errors are made. According to published meeting reports from the WHO Chemical Aspects Working Group, the WHO has a timetable for revising some of its guidelines for drinking-water quality, but for many of these toxic substances the planned changes are minimal or will be delayed for as long as 5 years. Given the limited nature of the planned WHO revisions to the inorganic toxic substances and the extended timetable for these revisions, we suggest that governments, researchers, and other stakeholders might establish independent recommendations for inorganic toxic substances and possibly other chemicals to proactively protect public health, or at the very least, revert to previous editions of the Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, which were more protective of public health.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Frisbie et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.