The plain, hard truth about pathogen monitoring

As a pretense for public health protection, pathogen monitoring is of little value and should be replaced by alternative strategies such as treatment optimization. Pathogen monitoring has concerned microbiologists for nearly a century. Over several years, numerous factors have inflated the value of pathogen monitoring for public health protection and led to such developments as the promulgation of the Information Collection Rule (ICR). Eighteen months of ICR data have only served to underscore the monitoring method's limitations. Methods 1622 and 1623 represent significant improvements but still fall short of providing information useful for compliance monitoring or public health decision‐making. To illustrate the shortcomings of pathogen monitoring, the authors cite recent cases in which poor‐quality analyses contributed to the creation of drinking water crises where none, in fact, existed. The authors propose that pathogen monitoring for protecting public health be replaced by alternative strategies such as optimizing treatment and maintaining water quality throughout storage and distribution.