Quantitatively assessing the health risks of drinking water based on a battery of in vitro bioassays
用成组生物效应标记方法定量评价饮用水健康风险

Water quality assessment has been drawn great attention due to close relationship between water quality and public health. The water quality evaluation has been conducted based on the methods of chemical analysis by which information of health risk is not available. However, bioassays can be used to compensate for the limitations in the traditional chemical methods. In this paper a battery of biomarker assays were applied to assess the health risks of drinking water from nine waterworks at different seasons. The results showed that the levels of toxicities including genotoxicity, estrogenic effect and Ah receptor effect of source water and the produced water were low and the health risks were acceptable. Direct and indirect genotoxicity might increase slightly in the produced water after disinfection in some waterworks. All the waterworks showed good removal efficiency for estrogenic substances, but poor removal efficiency for Ah receptor agonists due to their too low concentrations. This study demonstrated that the battery of bioassays as an indispensable and complementary tool for water quality assessment can be used to comprehensively evaluate the treatment efficiency of waterworks and provide prompt and useful water quality information.