THE Government has promised that by the end of September this year Jamaica should have draft regulations in place to ensure that the water consumed by the population is safe and healthy.

The national regulations which first have to be approved by the chief parliamentary counsel, will replace the World Health Organisation’s guidelines for drinking water quality and the Interim Jamaica Standards. The new regulations are being developed under the Public Health Act.

The thrust to establish the national water standards was spearheaded by the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the Pan-American Health Organisation and Environment Management Consultants Caribbean Ltd.

The agencies, at a workshop held at the Jamaica Pegasus on Thursday, looked at various issues in the sector, including the development and protection of water sources, treatment and distribution systems and surveillance systems for water quality.

Minister of Health Horace Dalley, who addressed the workshop, said it was important to have national drinking water regulations as it would become obligatory for persons who provide drinking water to the public to comply. The regulations, he said, would also cause a shift in the responsibility for quality assurance and quality control from the shoulders of regulators to service providers. In addition, the regulations would mandate new testing methods for contaminants, allow the health ministry to approve laboratories engaged in water testing, and strengthen enforcement strategies.

Dr Ravidya Burrowes, principal consultant of Environment Management Consultants, the company leading the research and the compilation of the draft, said the water standards and guidelines were outdated. “We have no regulations so we are using proxy regulations,” she said.

“We have a lot of people using raw water and the Millennium Development Goals requires 100 per cent coverage of the population with safe drinking water,” Dr Burrowes continued. She added that the increase in the number of bottled water companies in the country also gave rise to the need for national regulations of drinking water quality.

One of the objectives under the Millennium Development Goals, signed by United Nations member states in 2000, is to, by the year 2015, reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Statistics from the Planning Institute of Jamaica indicate that 20 per cent of Jamaicans do not have access to safe drinking water and the figures from the Ministry of Health revealed that 29 per cent of the population does not have access to piped water.

Minister Dalley said the government, through its water sector policy, was committed to ensuring that all Jamaican households, both in urban and rural communities, have access to potable water and to sanitation by 2010.