Water is an essential nutrient for all physiological functions and particularly important for thermoregulation. About 60% of our body weight is made of water. Under standard conditions (18-20 °C and moderate activity), water balance is regulated within 0.2 % of body weight over a 24-hour period. Water requirement varies between individuals and according to environmental conditions. Concerning c...

An estimation of the water used for human consumption in hospitals is essential to determine possible savings and to fix criteria to improve the design of new water consumption models. The present work reports on cold water for human consumption (CWHC) in hospitals in Spain and determines the possible savings. In the period of 2005-2012, 80 Eco-Management and Audit Schemes (EMAS) from 20 hospit...

The concept of water footprint (WF) is an important breakthrough in the evolving of methodologies, approaches and indicators for measuring freshwater appropriation and assessing the wastewater discharge. Industrial water footprint (IWF) methodology, which concentrates on the industrial production stages, can present a clear graphic of freshwater consumption and impacts caused by wastewater disc...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to investigate the quality of on-plot piped water and rainwater at the point of consumption in an area with rapidly expanding coverage of 'improved' water sources. METHODS Cross-sectional study of 914 peri-urban households in Kandal Province, Cambodia, between July-August 2011. We collected data from all households on water management, drinking water...

Restrictions on the use of water supplied by water corporations are frequently introduced in Australian cities whenever the demand for water exceeds the experienced or anticipated supply. This paper examines evidence from a stratified random survey of 2179 households in Sydney in a period when restrictions on domestic water use outside the home had just been imposed. The paper explores attitude...

Several cultures of north-central Nigeria do not use community cemeteries. Instead, human remains are buried in and around family compounds, often in shallow and sometimes unmarked graves. At several locations, graves and drinking water wells end up too close to be presumed environmentally safe. This paper reports findings of a pilot study that explored the potential for groundwater contaminati...

The prevalence of water quality incidents and disease outbreaks suggests an imperative to analyse and understand the roles of operators and organisations in the water supply system. One means considered in this paper is through human reliability analysis (HRA). We classify the human errors contributing to 62 drinking water accidents occurring in affluent countries from 1974 to 2001; define the ...

With a population of more than six billion people, food production from agriculture must be raised to meet increasing demand. While irrigated agriculture provides 40% of the total food production, it represents 80% of the freshwater consumption worldwide. In summer and drought conditions, efficient management of scarce water resources becomes crucial. The majority of irrigation canals are manag...