Practical Monitoring Strategies for Drinking Water and Bioaerosols in Resource-Limited Settings

The main goal of this dissertation was to develop practical water and bioaerosol monitoring strategies for resource limited settings. This goal was established because there are ~2.2 billion people who lack access to safe drinking water services, ~4.6 billion without access to safe sanitation services, and, in February 2021, more than 95% of the world population was susceptible to COVID-19 infection. Herein, widely available drinking water quality testing technologies were used to develop a scalable methodology to standardize water quality monitoring in cities. Passive and active aerosol sampling methods were optimized to facilitate bioaerosol monitoring near open wastewater canals in cities with poor sanitation. Stochastic mathematical models were used to estimate the risk of infection, illness, and mortality posed by bioaerosols near open wastewater canals, translating monitoring data into potential health outcomes. Lastly, a stochastic mathematical model was developed and converted into a web-application to facilitate the understanding of long-range aerosol transmission of COVID-19 indoors. It was demonstrated that sampling drinking water at the point of consumption provided a more accurate characterization of water safety than access to a type of water infrastructure. Passive aerosol sampling can provide quantitative fecal coliform data in low-resource settings, and active aerosol sampling allowed the collection of pathogen-specific data to identify which pathogens may pose an exposure risk. Risk assessment models indicated that bacterial pathogens present non-negligible risks of infection in La Paz, Bolivia, warranting future longitudinal investigations. The risk assessment application that was developed and applied for both assessment of exposure to fecal bioaerosols and SARS-CoV-2 contributed to the understanding of aerosol transmission of infectious diseases.