The work will support the Council Directive 98/83/EC of 3 November 1998 on the quality of water intended for human consumption. In particular the work will be related to the Quality of Water for Human Consumption, that stipulates in ‘Article 7 Monitoring’ that ‘In addition, Member States shall take all measures necessary to ensure that, where disinfection forms part of the preparation or distribution of water intended for human consumption, the efficiency of the disinfection treatment applied is verified, and that any contamination from disinfection by-products is kept as low as possible without compromising the disinfection’.

The proposed work will provide input into the development, implementation and evolution of EC directives dealing with the supply of safe drinking water, including the Directive concerning the Quality of Water intended for Human Consumption and also the Water Framework Directive and the List of Priority Substances which needs revisiting in the light of the proposed findings. The proposed work will provide, for the first time comprehensive information on disinfection by-product levels for various regions and countries in Europe and produce models to predict these levels in the study regions and other regions. The main advantage of the project is that the water analyses will be carried out by inter-calibrated laboratories (e.g. Finland, Italy and Greece) providing results that are comparable for various regions, providing recommendations for European standard methods, and providing information on disinfection by-products that are not routinely measured. This information is currently lacking but is needed for further development of policies within the EU. The epidemiological studies will provide health risk estimates in European populations for the development of EU policies on health and human exposure.

Furthermore the work will support the setting of the World Health Organisation drinking water guidelines, which are often adopted by the EU and its member states. It is also likely to impact the setting standards in the US and elsewhere in the world and the work by the International Agency of Research on Cancer (IARC).