Schools and hospitals use contaminated water

By Keith Perry

Thousands of schoolchildren and hospital patients risk contracting diseases from contaminated water.

The Ministry of Health has put schools and hospitals with their own water supplies on notice after it found that the standard of their water had declined since 1997.

Last night, the ministry's chief safety and regulation adviser, Dr Bob Boyd, said lack of monitoring put patients and schoolchildren at risk from diseases such as cholera, typhoid, salmonellosis, giardiosis and campylobacteriosis.

"We have been working with schools for three years now, and it is disappointing to see that a vast majority are still not complying."

The results from the 1998 Microbiological Quality of Drinking Water revealed continuing problems with schools. Only 320 of the 577 with registered water supplies provided water samples.

Of those, only five schools fully complied with New Zealand drinking water standards, and 104 were identified as having faecal coliforms in their drinking water. Inadequate monitoring of water quality meant 129,000 fewer New Zealanders had access to safe drinking water than two years ago, the report found.

Overall, standards had dropped compared with 1997, and the ministry blamed some large suppliers for failing to provide adequate water monitoring.

The report showed that seven of the nine hospitals nationwide with independent water supplies failed to meet drinking water standards.

Six hospitals failed due to lack of adequate water-quality monitoring and one hospital, Te Puia Springs on the East Coast, had faecal coliform contaminants in drinking water used by patients and visitors.

Dr Boyd said the microbiological quality of drinking water was an important factor in public health. Failure to maintain high standards led to the potential for outbreaks of disease.

However, it was encouraging that 93 per cent of treatment plants serving communities of more than 5000 people had adequate monitoring systems and only nine treatment plants failed to comply with the monitoring scheme - a 50 per cent improvement on 1997.

Overall, the survey found that 81 per cent of the surveyed population, or 2.61 million New Zealanders, had access to safe drinking water.

Ministry of Education spokesman Brian Mitchell said officials had been aware of the problems with drinking water in schools for some time and had taken steps to improve standards.

They had adopted one-to-one contact with problem schools and new guidelines would be issued for water testing in all schools covering areas such as ensuring tanks were covered and safe management.

Dianne Gibson, chief executive of Te Puia Springs Hospital, said the cause of the problem there had been identified as contaminants from nearby cattle farms which entered water supplies feeding the hospital.

She said the hospital had reached an agreement with the farms and regularly tested the water.