Over the last few years, U.S. EPA has been producing a series of resources to help water utilities develop Water Quality Surveillance and Response Systems (SRSs) to quickly detect and respond to contamination incidents. SRSs have one or more of the following components: online water quality monitoring, enhanced security monitoring, customer complaint surveillance, sampling and analysis, consequence management and public health surveillance.
In July, EPA published two new resources focused on the public health surveillance component. This type of surveillance is the ongoing collection and analysis of data, such as emergency hospital visits and calls to poison control centers, for the purpose of detecting disease and illness in a community. The agency’s new Public Health Surveillance Design Guidance for SRSs explains how a utility can develop such a program. And its Public Health Surveillance Assessment and Interview Form can help utilities engage their public health partners and document existing public health surveillance capabilities.
The resources are two of many other EPA publications and tools to support monitoring for contamination incidents.