NIWA Principal Scientist Graham McBride is contributing to a new World Health Organisation (WHO) book provisionally entitled ‘Animal Waste, Water Quality, Human Health’. The book will be highly relevant to water management in New Zealand.
Graham’s chapter on Comparative Risk Assessment is being prepared with two co-authors. The chapter is aimed at raising awareness of the health impacts of animal wastes. The whole book will be freely available on the WHO website.
Graham’s chapter will have an accompanying downloadable spreadsheet tool, aimed at helping to prioritise effective public health management, particularly in countries where policy development on zoonoses is lacking.
The book, due out early in 2010, is part of the WHO series on Emerging Issues in Water and Infectious Disease, and will accompany the 2004 publication, Waterborne Zoonoses: Identification, Causes and Control, which Graham also contributed to. The new book will have a greater focus on the generation and transport of faecal material from farmed animals into waterways, where human infection and illness can be the result.
