Drinking Water Quality and the Geospatial Distribution of Notified Gastro-Intestinal Infections

GRILC, Eva; GALE, Ivanka; VERŠIC, Aleš; ŽAGAR, Tina; SOCAN, Maja

The geographical analysis and data preparation were processed using ArcGIS 10 and Oracle 11g relation database geo-information technology. The spatial datasets of municipal and settlements areas were recovered from the Registry of Spatial Units, which is maintained by The Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia. * Patients living in a settlement not linked to a supply zone are supplied with the drinking water from an individual water supply system serving less than 50 users, and, therefore, they were not included in the analysis. However, there is the possibility of a supply zone having users in more than one village, and there is not a sampling point in all villages. The available data does not provide adequate information to link a supply zone to such a village. The Register of public water supply systems could not be used to more precisely determine the residence of the remaining patients from the first note, and, thus, we were unable to link them to the supply zones. Such a procedure could not be automated, and it requires a lot of manual work due to the nonconnectivity of the databases.