Drinking Water Security and Public Health Disease Outbreak Surveillance

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strives to develop technologies and protocols to assist drinking water utilities in reducing the risks of potential terrorist attacks on our nation's infrastructure. Of particular interest are the development and feasibility testing of contamination warning systems that integrate existing public health surveillance and water quality measurements. In collaboration with the EPA, APL is developing a novel prototype warning system that employs sensor clustering and Bayesian Network analyses. These techniques address the challenges of synthesizing results from disparate data types with different data rates and complex environmental and operational responses into a warning system that can provide the user with a measure of the likelihood that data anomalies do or do not indicate a potential water-borne disease outbreak. These critical challenges and how this novel approach and its components address them will be described.