My team has recently collated and standardised drinking water quality information for all public drinking water supplies in New Zealand (supplying water to ~85% of the total population). We have also created a spatial dataset of all these water supplies which has enabled us to link individuals to water supplies. We have used these datasets in conjunction with the Integrated Data Infrastructure which is a whole-of-population dataset of administrative data linked at the individual level. This has facilitated large retrospective cohort studies, e.g. we have a birth cohort of all births from 2008-2021 tracked over time 735,000 births which we have linked to prenatal drinking water quality. The are large opportunities to look at a wide range of drinking water contaminants (e.g. lead, arsenic, microbial), health outcomes (hospitalisations, cancers, deaths, neurodevelopmental outcomes) and populations (children, indigenous populations, high deprivation). There are a number of proposed projects where our datasets could support existing proposals.
Topic 1. Waterborne contaminants and health risks: occurrence, behaviour, interactions and vulnerability