Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch

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.

External Activities

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. Our teams:

• 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
• Promote improved public health through communication and education

Internal Activities

As critical components of any plan to assure healthy lives, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) 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 CDC at Work page of the Healthy Water website.

Our branch is organized in teams covering domestic WASH, global WASH, health promotion and communication, and domestic and global WASH laboratory activities. Our core strategies are to:

• Build a strong team
• Deliver the best administrative/mission support
• Use a multidisciplinary approach to yield the best science
• Develop strategic internal/external partnerships
• Maximize effectiveness and productivity from taxpayer investment
• Provide superior technical support and capacity building expertise to partners
• Train and educate new waterborne disease prevention experts
• Translate science into prevention recommendations