Project to improve Europe's drinking water
Although largely taken for granted in Europe, healthy potable drinking water is humankind's most important resource and vital for its survival. For this reason, the recently launched EU-funded Healthy Water project aims to increase knowledge about water borne diseases and apply this knowledge to improve the quality of drinking water in Europe through guidelines. 'Though drinking water in Europe is considered to be safe from an overall perspective, we suspect that contaminated water causes more illnesses than is generally believed,' Dr Manfred Höfle of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research told CORDIS News. Funded by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the three-year project will focus its work on filling two gaps remaining in our knowledge of the micro-organisms found in European drinking water. 'Currently, the technology applied to drinking water can only detect E. coli' explains Dr Höfle. 'So we are working to develop state-of-the-art detection technology able to identify all other bacteria, and viruses and protozoa that are known or suspected to cause water borne infections.' Having developed a DNA 'aqua chip' able to detect bacterial pathogens in water, Dr Höfle and his colleagues now want to refine the chip even further to make it sensitive to more pathogenic bacterial species and even viruses. 'Whereas bacteria and protozoa store their genetic information on DNA molecules, many viruses store theirs on RNA molecules. So we are developing the chip to make it able to recognise both,' explained Dr Höfle. In order to find out which infectious diseases in Europe are induced by unhygienic water, the scientists involved in the project have earmarked ¿ 0.5 million to conduct an epidemiological study to identify factors that could suggest a link between infections and unclean drinking water. 'So far we do not have this kind of structured data in Europe,' said Dr Höfle. 'We think this will give us some indication which pathogens we should pay particular attention to when developing the chip.' In doing so, the project partners hope to make a contribution towards improving the quality of drinking water and reducing the number of water borne diseases in Europe. 'All our efforts are aimed at further improving the safety of European drinking water - to provide a real 'healthy water'',' Dr Höfle said. One way the scientists hope to achieve this goal is by making the knowledge gained through the project available to policymakers working on the adaptation of the EU's Drinking Water Directive (DWD). The EU Drinking Water Directive (DWD) aims to protect the health of EU consumers by making sure drinking water is wholesome and clean by setting standards on a total of 48 microbiological and chemical parameters that must be monitored and tested regularly.
Countries
Germany