Factors influencing perceptions of private water quality in North America: a systematic review

Factors influencing perceptions of private water quality in North America: a systematic review

Blog Article

Abstract Background An estimated four million and 43 million people in copyright and the USA use private water supplies.Private water supplies are vulnerable to waterborne disease outbreaks.Private water supplies in copyright and the USA are often unregulated and private water management is often a choice left to the owner.Perceptions of water quality become important in influencing the adoption of private water stewardship practices, therefore safeguarding public health.

Methods We conducted a systematic literature review to understand factors that shape perceptions of water quality among private water users.We searched six computer databases (Web of science, Medline, Scopus, EBSCO, PubMed and Agricola).The search was limited to primary peer-reviewed publications, grey literature and excluded conference proceedings, review articles, and non-peer review articles.We berness white sneakers restricted the search to papers published in English and to articles which published data on surveys of private water users within copyright and the USA.

The search was also restricted invertatop squeeze bottle to publications from 1986 to 2017.The literature search generated 36,478 records.Two hundred and four full text were reviewed.Results Fifty-two articles were included in the final review.

Several factors were found to influence perceptions of water quality including organoleptic preferences, chemical and microbiological contaminants, perceived risks, water well infrastructure, past experience with water quality, external information, demographics, in addition to the values, attitudes, and beliefs held by well owners.Conclusions Understanding the factors that shape perceptions of water quality among private water users is an important step in developing private water management policies to increase compliance towards water testing and treatment in copyright and the USA.As many jurisdictions in copyright and the USA do not have mandatory private water testing or treatment guidelines, delineating these factors is an important step in informing future research and guiding policy on the public health of private water systems.