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

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...

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Autores principales: Frisbie, Seth H., Mitchell, Erika J., Sarkar, Bibudhendra
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535738/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26268322
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-015-0050-7
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author Frisbie, Seth H.
Mitchell, Erika J.
Sarkar, Bibudhendra
author_facet Frisbie, Seth H.
Mitchell, Erika J.
Sarkar, Bibudhendra
author_sort Frisbie, Seth H.
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-45357382015-08-14 Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water Frisbie, Seth H. Mitchell, Erika J. Sarkar, Bibudhendra Environ Health Review 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. BioMed Central 2015-08-13 /pmc/articles/PMC4535738/ /pubmed/26268322 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-015-0050-7 Text en © Frisbie et al. 2015 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.
spellingShingle Review
Frisbie, Seth H.
Mitchell, Erika J.
Sarkar, Bibudhendra
Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
title Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
title_full Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
title_fullStr Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
title_full_unstemmed Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
title_short Urgent need to reevaluate the latest World Health Organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
title_sort urgent need to reevaluate the latest world health organization guidelines for toxic inorganic substances in drinking water
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535738/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26268322
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-015-0050-7
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