Assessment of public health risk associated with viral contamination in harvested urban stormwater for domestic applications

• Human health risks for three non-potable uses of treated stormwater are modeled.
• Crop irrigation poses the highest risk, followed by showering and toilet-flushing.
• Only toilet-flushing is deemed acceptable based on the U.S. EPA risk benchmark.
• Both toilet-flushing and showering are within the WHO recommended disease burdens.

Capturing stormwater is becoming a new standard for sustainable urban stormwater management, which can be used to supplement water supply portfolios in water-stressed cities. The key advantage of harvesting stormwater is to use low impact development (LID) systems for treatment to meet water quality requirement for non-potable uses. However, the lack of scientific studies to validate the safety of such practice has limited its adoption. Microbial hazards in stormwater, especially human viruses, represent the primary public health threat. Using adenovirus and norovirus as target pathogens, we investigated the viral health risk associated with a generic scenario of urban stormwater harvesting practice and its application for three non-potable uses: 1) toilet flushing, 2) showering, and 3) food-crop irrigation. The Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) results showed that food-crop irrigation has the highest annual viral infection risk (median range: 6.8 × 10− 4–9.7 × 10− 1 per-person-per-year or pppy), followed by showering (3.6 × 10− 7–4.3 × 10− 2 pppy), and toilet flushing (1.1 × 10− 7–1.3 × 10− 4 pppy). Disease burden of each stormwater use was ranked in the same order as its viral infection risk: food-crop irrigation > showering > toilet flushing. The median and 95th percentile risk values of toilet-flushing using treated stormwater are below U.S. EPA annual risk benchmark of ≤ 10− 4 pppy, whereas the disease burdens of both toilet-flushing and showering are within the WHO recommended disease burdens of ≤ 10− 6 DALYs pppy. However, the acceptability of showering risk interpreted based on the U.S. EPA and WHO benchmarks is in disagreement. These results confirm the safety of stormwater application in toilet flushing, but call for further research to fill the data gaps in risk modeling as well as risk benchmarks.

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