Galway city water alert continues

Galway's "boil water" alert is expected to continue indefinitely for 70,000 city
dwellers, extending right through the annual film fleadh, arts festival and race
week.
However, 20,000 people living in an arc extending from Tuam to Athenry,
Claregalway and Oranmore should be able to resume drinking their tap water
immediately, Galway's incident response team said yesterday.
Addressing a press briefing, the response team, involving the two local
authorities and the Health Service Executive West was reluctant to give a
definitive time scale for lifting the four-month-long alert in the city area.
The alert was put in place in mid-March in response to detection of
unseasonally high levels of the cryptosporidium parasite, which causes
gastrointestinal illness. Most laboratory confirmed cases of the illness involved
the hominis version of the parasite, caused by human sewage. To date no
one source has been identified.
Just under 50 people among 238 reported cases had to go to hospital, HSE
West's public health director Dr Diarmuid O'Donovan confirmed yesterday. He
estimated that up to five times the number of laboratory confirmed cases may
have occurred in the Galway community.
Fewer than 10 cases, mainly affecting young children, became seriously ill
and all had now recovered, Dr O'Donovan said.
Rod Killeen, senior engineer with Galway County Council, said that the "clock
would start ticking" towards a clear supply when the old Terryland waterworks
in the city was decommissioned. Under pressure from business interests, the
local authorities had originally set June 15th as the target date. The city
council then admitted in early June that there had been a "slide" in meeting
the deadline.ഊ"Complex engineering works" at the Luimnagh [ Tuam] waterworks plant
involved installation of treatments to remove the cryptosporidium parasite
which prompted the alert, Mr Killeen and his city counterpart, Ray Brennan,
told yesterday's briefing.
They said that clear criteria had been set out by the HSE and the
Environmental Protection Agency to lift the boil water notice, and Luimnagh's
upgraded plant now had clean water, safe for human consumption.
The HSE West has said that no additional cases of cryptosporidiosis have
been confirmed by laboratories in recent weeks, and occurrence of the
potentially serious illness is now approaching "background levels" for this time
of year.
HSE West is advising people with impaired immune systems to continue to
follow their doctors' advice on boiling water.

Lorna Siggins
© 2007 The Irish Times