USDA Reports On The Danger Of Drinking Groundwater

Mark Borchardt, research microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, talks to Water Online Radio about a first-of-its-kind study on the correlation between groundwater and gastrointestinal illness.

The following is an excerpt from a Q&A with Water Online Radio. Click on the Radio Player above to hear the full interview.

Water Online Radio: Tell us about the work that's being done at the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Mark: Well, that's a big question – there's everything from plant breeding to pesticide use to soil fertility. It employs about 7,000 or 8,000 PhD-level scientists. But one focus of Agricultural Research Service is water quality.

Water Online Radio: Mark, one of the things I know that you're working on is this WAHTER study – W-A-H-T-E-R – in Wisconsin. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Mark: I should probably first explain why we spelled it the way that we did. It's an acronym for Water and Health Trial for Enteric Risk. And, the word enteric there refers to gastrointestinal. And the overarching goal of that study was to measure the amount of gastrointestinal illness from drinking groundwater.

A number of communities across the nation rely on groundwater as their drinking water source. There's been good epidemiological studies done in the past on disease transmission from those communities that use surface water as their drinking water source, but until our study, no one had investigated groundwater.

So, that was our goal, and we had four study objectives.

First, we were interested in relating the amount of viruses – human viruses – in tap water in some of these communities using groundwater. And I should mention that these are communities that don't disinfect, which is not an uncommon practice in the United States.

Our second objective was to measure how much of illness was exactly due to contaminated groundwater, as opposed to things that happened in the drinking water distribution system.

Our third objective was to isolate, so to speak, distribution systems in these communities, and estimate how much illness came from problems with the distribution system infrastructure.

And then our fourth objective was to relate operations and maintenance procedures that utility managers use when delivering drinking water with how those practices affected pathogen levels in their drinking water.