Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch

The lead coordination and response unit for domestic and global water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)-related disease in CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.

Activities

• Tracking and assessing disease
• Investigating and preparing for disease events
• Sampling and detecting pathogens
• Removing and inactivating pathogens
• Evaluating public health interventions
• Promoting public health
• Facilitating policy change

With its many uses for drinking, recreation, sanitation, hygiene, and industry, water is our most precious global resource. Clean and safe water, adequate sanitation, and improved hygiene are critical to sustaining human health and life. Although water is essential for life, it can also spread illness when it is contaminated by disease-causing organisms.

We work to protect and improve public health by promoting healthy drinking and recreational water, adequate sanitation, and improved hygiene in the United States and around the world. We track waterborne disease nationally, identify the causes and sources of waterborne disease and outbreaks, establish the risk factors for infection, develop improved laboratory detection and sampling methods, develop new ways to remove or inactivate pathogens, assess new prevention ideas, develop WASH-related guidance and policy, and promote improved public health. We are organized in teams covering domestic WASH, global WASH, health promotion and communication, and domestic and global WASH laboratory activities.

As critical components of any plan to assure healthy lives, water, sanitation, and hygiene expertise is supported by many groups at CDC. The Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch is one group at CDC focusing on WASH-related infectious disease prevention. These groups work together on WASH-related issues bridging infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, emergency response, injury prevention, and worker safety. For information on other groups working on water-related health issues visit the “Water-related Work at CDC” on CDC’s Healthy Water Web site.