UNSAFE WATER
Lessons of Walkerton go unheeded, expert says
More than 300,000 Canadians a year contract a stomach bug from municipally supplied tap water, with some ending up in hospital, a government study finds.
More than 300,000 Canadians contract an acute stomach bug every year from the municipally supplied water that comes out of their taps, some likely ending up in hospital or even dying, a new government study suggests.
The research also concludes millions of people are still getting their drinking water from sub-standard municipal and private systems — despite repeated safety warnings after the tainted-water disaster in Walkerton, Ont.
The authors at Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada argue the figures show the risk of getting sick from drinking water in Canada remains low. But they suggest that more municipalities look at implementing multiple, failsafe treatment “barriers,” shown to be the most effective way to keep water safe.
Almost 1.5 million Canadians are still served by municipal systems that have only one form of treatment or none at all, often drawing on surface water prone to contamination, the researchers say.
A water-safety expert whose organization advised the Walkerton judicial inquiry said she was “shocked” by that number.
Such higher-risk systems were banned in Ontario after tap water contaminated with E. coli killed seven people in Walkerton in 2000, said Theresa McClenaghan of the Canadian Environmental Law Association. She thought everyone else had followed suit.
“(Walkerton) was a huge wake-up call, but here we are 15 years later and as the tragedy and the events recede in time, people start to forget the lessons,” McClenaghan said.
There are also another 5.5 million Canadians who rely on private wells or smaller systems, another federal study notes, which leads to about 103,000 gastro illnesses a year. The research is part of an effort to trace the source of an estimated 20.5 million acute gastrointestinal illnesses that occur every year in Canada.
A previous study attributes four million of these cases to food-borne pathogens, with the rest stemming from causes like person-to-person contact, touching animals and swimming in tainted water.
The gastrointestinal bugs can have minor effects, such as diarrhea, vomiting or nausea, but sometimes lead to far more serious cases, notes Katarina Pintar, lead author and the agency’s manager of food-safety policy.
A study by Pintar and colleagues published this year suggested the four million food-caused cases result in 11,000 hospitalizations and 238 deaths.
Applying those figures to the estimated 430,000 water-borne cases would mean about 1,100 Canadians end up in hospital and 23 die from contaminated drinking water annually.
The problem, though, is that few of the acute cases are reported to authorities; the figures are all estimates.
In one of the new studies, the government team categorized municipal water systems serving 1,000 people or more according to the level of treatment, then used the results of earlier research on water-caused disease to extrapolate the total number of cases. They came up with 334,000 illnesses from those larger systems. Using a similar method, they estimated 103,000 cases from smaller systems and private wells.