Control Strategies for Chemical Contamination of Drinking Water

Water is essential for life to exist on earth. Drinking water condition is preeminent for the health of an individual. The structure and synthesis of cell constituents and carriage of nutrients into the cells and also the body metabolism is pivoted on water. Despite improvements in the past few decades, access to good quality drinking water remains a censorious problem. A contaminant is any physical, biological, chemical or radiological substance or matter that is present in water. When the contaminants are present in quantities such that the water becomes unfit for consumption, then the water is set to be contaminated. The contaminants present in water disturb the spontaneity of the mechanism and result in both short and long term diseases in human beings. In drinking water, multiple chemical pollutants have been found. From a variety of sources, such as industrial and municipal discharges, urban and rural runoff, naturally occurring geological formations, agricultural runoff, drinking water distribution materials, and the drinking water treatment procedure, these contaminants enter drinking water supplies. Hospital wastewater contamination of natural aquatic environments is a serious problem for both the environment and public health. Hospitals frequently utilize disinfectants, medications, radionuclides, and solvents for therapeutic and investigative purposes. Some of these compounds combine with hospital effluents after application, and in industrialized nations, they eventually make their way to the municipal sewer network. Hospitals typically dump their effluent into septic tanks with diffusion wells in several underdeveloped nations. Hospital operations that release chemical substances into the environment run the risk of contaminating water supplies and endangering human health. The aim of this chapter is to explain the various control strategies such as artificial infiltration, point-use filtration and various other conventional and advanced control strategies for chemical contamination of drinking water.