Contaminated water and poor sanitation is still a major cause of illness, with diarrheal disease being the principal cause of morbidity and mortality in children under 5 years in developing nations. In the developed world, disease outbreaks associated with advanced water supply systems are still common and a major concern for water and sewage undertakers, regulators and the consumer. Engineering solutions drove the reduction of water-related illness in the nineteenth century emergent conurbations of the industrialized nations of today. The on-going problems of the 21st Century require new approaches, which are inherently inter-disciplinary and inter-agency and operating at the river basin scale to effect the commitment to the implementation of further health improvements.

The importance of hydrological controls at the catchment scale on the risks from water and sanitation are accepted but not well understood. Enhanced transport of pathogens during hydrological events has been implicated as a cause of elevation in gastrointesinal illness in developed nations and flooding has been implicated in disease outbreaks world-wide

However, catchment microbial dynamics has been given little attention by the engineering, environmental and public health communities to-date. This is changing with new ‘risk based’ and ‘real time’ approaches to risk management being proposed by WHO for drinking, recreational and shellfish harvesting waters. Currently based on simple and qualitative HACCP principles, there is a growing need to address the processes, drivers and resultant health risk outcomes at a catchment scale. This will be achieved through the extension and application of the latest catchment and nearshore modeling approaches, linked to epidemiological and quantitative microbiological health risk assessments, to provide the policy and public health communities with tools capable of paralleling those currently available for the ‘ecological’ parameters, such as nutrients and dissolved oxygen.

The workshop will address these issues and be directed at defining ‘needs’ and ‘opportunities’, as well as presenting ‘state of the art’ research in this area. This will be structured around the four themes cited below; there will be 2 short presentations at the beginning of each theme, with the remaining period being allotted to a brain-storming session of all participants on the issues, challenges and a multi-disciplinary approach to address these challenges. The participants will be drawn from developing and developed nations to reflect the inherent similarity of catchment scale problems, management responses and the tools required. Time is allocated for synthesis of conclusions from each thematic session and the ‘output’ of the two day workshop will be a clear statement of: