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Wisconsin study on viruses in drinking water provokes mixed reactions

Drinking fountain
Beyond recent posts about Legionella, we don’t talk a lot about the built environment of municipal water systems, although Norm Pace and his group at CU Boulder have done extensive work on the topic in recent years.
Therefore I thought I’d better point to this study, published a couple of weeks ago in Environmental Health Perspectives.  Basically the study found that there are a number of human viruses in non-disinfected tap water which apparently is fairly common in communities that draw from groundwater.

Media reports interestingly ranged from “duh, old news” to “this is terrible, we’re all getting sick and something must be done“.

 

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David Coil

David Coil is a Project Scientist in the lab of Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis. David works at the intersection between research, education, and outreach in the areas of the microbiology of the built environment, microbial ecology, and bacterial genomics. Twitter

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