Estimating relative benefits of differing strategies for management of wastewater in lower Egypt using quantitative microbial risk analysis (qmra) :...

The Government of Egypt’s Holding Company for Water and Wastewater (HCWW) is mandated to provide sanitation facilities and manage them appropriately in an effort to provide basic services to Egyptian families and to protect human health. While the government aims to provide households with sewered sanitation, many rural families still rely on on-site septic tanks which are not regulated and which may be emptied into agricultural canals or directly onto farmers’ fields. In the Nile delta, water is a key input to agriculture, which drives growth and development, but the informal reuse of untreated domestic waste is widespread and presents a significant risk to health. The Bank is supporting the government to invest in sanitation and wastewater treatment to address these risks. In addition, the Bank has worked with HCWW to carry out research on the most cost-effective strategies for provision of sanitation in terms of the public health of downstream communities. The study, which was partly funded by the WPP, assessed the health implications of pathogenic contamination of drainage water which is reused in agriculture. The study incorporates an innovative statistical tool, known as Quantifiable Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA), by which the relative effectiveness of different wastewater management strategies can be assessed in terms of optimizing health benefits to downstream populations. [authors abstract]