Question:
The results of the recent Ministry of Health initiatives to improve water quality in NZ have been: better and more microbiological monitoring, it is now possible to be 95 percent confident that the standards are being complied with 95 percent of the time in many supplies. Is it right?

Answer: Public health services and local authorities now have microbiological performance records covering over three times as many supplies as in 1991 (1750 were reported on in 1997, compared to 432 in 1991), upgrading of many water supplies - particularly by local authorities with poor provisional grades in the 1993/94 Ministry of Health grading round, safer drinking water supplies, an increasing number of water supplies now comply with the faecal coliform criteria in the Standards (an indicator of the absence of faecal contamination), clear accountability for safe water - responsibility for monitoring of drinking-water quality lies with suppliers. These improvements have been a result of a major programme to improve the public health safety of drinking-water in New Zealand begun by the Ministry of Health in 1992. At that time: there was a lack of monitoring and poor testing - some didn't test the bacteriological quality of the water before it entered reticulation (28%), others only tested infrequently (58% only four times a year), information recorded was often of poor quality, grading of community drinking-water supplies was incomplete and out-of-date chemical analysis was carried out infrequently (every five years). To improve the public health safety of drinking-water supplies the Ministry has: each year since 1992 issued an Annual Report on the Microbiological Quality of Drinking-Water Supplies in New Zealand, carried out public health grading of community drinking-water supplies according to their public health safety since 1993, commissioned a national electronic data and information system (Water Information New Zealand (WINZ)) for community drinking-water supplies which has operated since 1994, published the Register of Community