More vigilance for water quality

IWAS ABLE to confirm that the Department of Health ( DOH) does have a list of accredited laboratories all over the country that are capable of testing the quality of water. However, the list is not updated because the latest list was posted December 31, 2020.

Considering how important water quality is, for public safety, I think that the DOH should be updating the list either monthly or quarterly.

On the upside, there is a national law that requires water refilling stations to have monthly microbial tests and also physico- chemical tests twice a year. That means that if you are buying bottled water from the refilling stations, you have to ask them to show their monthly test results, to make sure that they are following the law and that their water is safe.

Also on the upside, the DOH does have very clear requirements for the accreditation of testing labs. It is relatively easy to comply with these requirements, but I hear that the DOH is becoming stricter in the implementation, the fact that they have a special unit that is dedicated to their accreditation function.

Still on the upside, both Maynilad and Manila Water have current projects involving third party DOH accredited labs to monitor their own water quality on top of their own inhouse monitoring.

This redundancy is good already, but i t would be good i f l ocal government units (LGUs) would also have their own monitoring so that we can all trust that our water is safe.

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An expert in water testing tells me that the standards mandated by DOH to the LGUs and the private water concessionaires requires them to monitor the potability of drinking water only in relation to total microbial or plate count as well as the total coliform or fecal or e-coli count.

He added that the DOH requires physico-chemical tests only twice a year, usually involving only 14 tests out of the 50 tests that could be done under the Philippine National Standards for Drinking Water ( PNSDW). But the actual number of tests done would depend on the LGUs and the water concessionaires. The testing for mercury and other hazardous heavy metals are based on their requirements.

Moreover, he says that all micro and physico-chemical standards in the PNSDW as implemented by DOH are all based on US and western standards. That could be a problem, because there could be contaminants present here that are not present in those foreign countries.

I n t heory, all l aboratories monitoring the water quality should be accredited by the DOH, otherwise their test results would be questionable.

If the tests are only conducted twice a year, what happens in between when there could be leaks in the system and illegal connections that could contaminate the system?/