Water and foodborne contamination

Introduction Ensuring access to a sufficient quantity of safe water not only reduces exposure to biological and chemical waterborne contaminants, but also reduces exposures through other routes. One notable exposure route is via food. In the United States, a place with stringent food safety controls, there are an estimated 48 million cases of foodborne disease every year (Scallan et al., 2011a). Many of these cases result from inadequate hand hygiene; reliance on unsafe water for processing, cleaning, or preparing food; and/or hydrologic-scale water movement that contributes to contaminant transport and/or uptake (Motarjemi and Käferstein, 1999; Boxall et al., 2008). These processes are often compounded in low and middle income countries where access to insufficient quantities of safe water results in greater reliance on polluted water sources for irrigation (Raschid-Sally and Jayakody, 2009).