In February 2006, the project entitled "Enhancing Human Health Through Improved Water Quality" was successful in being awarded an ERTDI grant of €1.1 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This grant is funded by the Irish Government under the National Development Plan.

The project is an interdisciplinary programme and consists of 7 workpackages involving scientists, doctors and engineers from the Environmental Change Institute, NUI Galway, University College Dublin and the Health Service Executive West’s Public Health Department.

Sustainable access to safe drinking water is universally recognised as a key issue in human health and development. Treatment of water intended for human consumption to eliminate recognised infectious and toxic contaminants plays a central role in ensuring access to safe drinking water, but it is not sufficient to rely only on conventional treatment. It is important to protect water sources against bacterial contamination and to consider also the adverse health impacts of contamination of protozoans.

This comprehensive study, will examine a number of concerning issues in relation to water quality. Briefly it will:

• Classify aquifers into 3 distinct groups "extremely vunerable", "vunerable" and "less vunerable". The vunerablity matrix uses both geographical and hydrogeographical factors to rank an aquifer. See Workpackage 1
  
  
• Assess the effect of temporal variation in relation to seasonal and environmental factors and the occurrence of pathogens and non-bacterial pathogens. See Workpackage 2
  
  
• Determine the presence of antimicrobial substances (e.g. antibiotics) and antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in effluent, untreated water and treated water. See Workpackage 3
  
  
• Develop molecular biology techniques to discriminate between human and animal sources of faecal contamination in water sources. See Workpackage 4
  
  
• Using Geographical Information System (GIS), create meaningful spatially related data with regards to the occurrence of cryptosporidiosis in the population. This will deliver a Health Atlas for epidemiological surveillance purposes. See Workpackage 5
  
  
• Generate a Microbial Risk Assessment (MRA) model as a result of the information from the other work packages. This can be used to identify when potable water is at high risk of being contaminated. See Workpackage 6