Drinking Water Pollution and Treatment

Drinking Water Pollution and Treatment
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Drinking Water Pollution and Treatment: Literature Review
Introduction
The quality of drinking water is a critical public health concern. While the last few decades have witnessed significant efforts to improve access to clean drinking water, the World Health Organization says that about 10% of the global population lacks access to sources of quality drinking water (Levallois & Villanueva, 2019). Universal access to water and sanitation is also one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that member states have committed to achieving by 2030. Water contamination leads to waterborne diseases such as diarrhea that claim almost one million people annually, with children under the age of 5 comprising the majority (Levallois & Villanueva, 2019). In industrialized economies, chemical pollution has remained to be a major concern since chemical exposure to drinking water results in chronic diseases, including cancer and serious reproductive defects such as neurodevelopmental issues.
Water pollution is a global concern, and is not limited to developed economies (Pathak, 2013). Today, water contamination is increasingly becoming a serious challenge to developing countries as demonstrated by the rising incidents of chronic diseases that were once common in industrialized nations (Levallois & Villanueva, 2019). The objective of this review is to present the common ways of drinking water pollution and understand approaches to treat or make water safe for human and domestic consumption. Next, the proposed mechanism of treating water using nanofiltration will be presented. Insights from this review will inform environmentalists, public health officers, policymakers, governments, and the public of the importance of maintaining water quality to prevent serious waterborne diseases.
Technical review
The majority of recent publications focusing on the quality of drinking water and its relevance to human health have identified chemical contamination as the most important mechanism of rendering water unfit for human and domestic use. For instance, Levallois and Villanueva (2019) report that out of 20 papers published in a recent special issue, 11 papers were on chemical contamination while 8 papers were on microbiological contamination. Only a single paper was on radioactivity. The 11 papers on chemical contamination came from industrialized economies denoting that Low and Medium-Income Countries (LMICs) still consider microbial contamination a serious challenge in accessing quality drinking water (Levallois & Villanueva, 2019). Nevertheless, chemical contamination from different sources also affects these areas, and research on these contaminants as well as ways of treating water will be critical.
On chemical contamination, three out of eleven papers focused on descriptive properties of contaminants, including nitrites, geogenic cation stability (Na, K, Mg, and Ca), and Trihalomethane (THM) concentration (Levallois & Villanueva, 2019). Another review focused on the assessment of fluoride exposure while the rest of the papers were about the health effects of drinking contaminated water. Lin et al (2022) have provided an elaborate review of the impacts of water pollution on disease heterogeneity and human health. In this review, the authors identify diarrhea, skin diseases, cancer, and child health as issues of priority. As more than 80 percent of human sewage is discharged into rivers and oceans, these anthropogenic activities result in more than 50 diseases due to poor water quality (Lin et al., 2022). These statistics reflect the importance of treating drinking water to eliminate contaminations that result in human diseases.
Sharma and Bhattacharya (2017) have reviewed several interventions for decontaminating drinking water, including precipitation and coagulation, distillation, adsorption, activated carbon, activated alumina, zeolite, silica gel, ion exchange, ion exchange resin, membrane water treatment, electrodialysis membrane treatment, catalytic processes, bioremediation, and disinfection. Of these methods, disinfection has been adopted in many countries in the world and chlorine has frequently been used t...