In any wastewater recycling scheme, the protection of public health is of primary importance. In Australia, the public health requirements applying to the treatment of recycled water are stringent. They use the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) metric to set a level of negligible public health risk. The target maximum risk of 10^–6 DALY per person per year has been adopted in Australian water recycling guidelines since 2006. A key benefit of the DALY approach is its ability to standardise the understanding of risk across disparate areas of public health. To address the key challenge of translating the results of monitoring of microorganisms in the recycled water into this quantitative public health metric, we have developed a novel method. This paper summarises an approach where microbial surrogate organisms indigenous to wastewater are used to measure the efficiency of water recycling treatment processes and estimate public health risk. An example of recent implementation in the Greater Sydney region of Australia is provided.

在任何废水回收计划中，保护公众健康都是头等大事。在澳大利亚，适用于再生水处理的公共卫生要求非常严格。他们使用残疾调整生命年 (DALY) 指标来设定可忽略的公共卫生风险水平。目标最大风险 10 ^–6自 2006 年以来，澳大利亚水循环指南采用了每人每年 DALY。DALY 方法的一个主要好处是它能够标准化对不同公共卫生领域的风险的理解。为了解决将循环水中微生物监测结果转化为定量公共卫生指标的关键挑战，我们开发了一种新方法。本文总结了一种方法，其中使用废水中的微生物替代生物来衡量水循环处理过程的效率并估计公共健康风险。提供了澳大利亚大悉尼地区最近实施的一个例子。