Clean drinking water is the most important nutrient for health and wellbeing.  As a result, the protection of water quality should be one of the highest priorities for everyone in the world. The World Health Organisation (WHO) gives general guidelines on this topic, but it is up to each nation to define their own measures. However, a globally uniformed policy is difficult to achieve since each nation faces their own set of unique challenges specific to their environment. For example, ambient water temperature, climate, water source, and usage. 

To protect our drinking water, we must take care to prevent biofilm growth and prevent pathogens from living and thriving in our water network. There are many pathogens that can present in drinking water systems such as Legionella pneumophilia. This bacterium can cause some severe illness and under some circumstances even causing death. The presentation will also show different statistics about the occurrence of Legionella in Australia. 

Therefore, it is vital to pay attention to our pipework design and protect the drinking water network for the benefit of public health. Even more so for those vulnerable in our community, such as that within aged care and hospital buildings in Australia.

This presentation aims to highlight various challenges that are present when maintaining drinking water quality. It emphasises the rising need to focus more on this topic and provides examples of best practice used worldwide. It will also address health risks that can arise from stagnation within piping systems, biology in our water supply, the occurrence of biofilm from bacterial growth and design methods to protect our most precious resource, water. 

Furthermore, it will give practical suggestions to minimise the raising health risks within drinking water systems based on different use of materials and design perspectives such as, the avoidance of oversizing of pipe systems, increase of velocities for self-cleansing effect, accurate water usage consideration for a better simultaneous demand calculation and pressure losses consideration within the whole water network. 

And it will close the presentation with an outlook about possible advanced technologies used for monitoring in water networks in other countries to protect the health of the public.