Scientists at NUI Galway have secured a €1 million research programme from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study water quality and human health.
The interdisciplinary programme will involve scientists, doctors and engineers from NUI Galway's environmental change institute (ECI), University College Dublin and the Health Service Executive West's public health department.
The Environmental Protection Agency's deputy director general, Dr Pádraic Larkin, said it was the first initiative approved under its recent call for environmental and health research projects.
"In our annual report on drinking water quality, group schemes consistently show problems," he said, and also noted challenges posed by one-off housing, septic tanks and the general pace of housing development.
Although this programme has a three-year time scale, any significant data to hand would be passed on to relevant policymakers, Dr Larkin added.
The ECI research will focus on cryptosporidium, a microscopic parasite commonly found in sheep faeces and which can cause diarrhoea in children. The study will also examine ways of determining whether water contamination is caused by human or animal waste.
"Faecal contamination can be detected, but it is not so easy to distinguish whether this originates from humans, animals or birds," Dr Emer Colleran, director of the ECI, said. "We will be looking at a group of bacteria that are host specific, and identify molecular techniques to identify them at source."
Prof Martin Cormican of NUI Galway's bacteriology department said that the study represented a major opportunity to improve our understanding of the link between water quality and our health.