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Spatial dynamic assessment of health risks for urban river cruises

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Abstract

River cruising ships move along river courses, and thus health risks to passengers may vary spatially due to the accidental exposure of river fecal pollution. This study performed a spatial dynamic assessment of health risks for river cruises in the highly urbanized Tamsui River Basin. First, the spatial distributions of river Escherichia coli (E. coli) were probabilistically characterized using indicator kriging (IK). Moreover, the current river cruise information was surveyed to obtain cruise routes and transit times. Then, to explore the parametric uncertainty of quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA), the ingestion rate (IR) for boating was determined using Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). Moreover, river E. coli distributions were estimated using nonparametric MCS according to multi-threshold IK estimates. Eventually, after combining the distribution of the joint probability of the IR and E. coli in QMRA, the β-Poisson dose–response function was adopted to analyze risks to river cruise passengers at discretized segments of cruise routes. Health risks to river cruise passengers were integrated at the discretized segments to explore suitable recreational strategies for river cruises. The research results indicate that all health risks do not exceed a daily target level of 8 illnesses per 1000 exposures for single-trip cruise routes. However, health risks to passengers can exceed this level for round-trip cruise routes along highly polluted urban river courses.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration for generously supporting the data on E. coli in the Tamsui River Basin, and the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology for financially supporting this research under Contract No. MOST 106-2410-H-424-020.

Funding

This study received financial support from Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology under Contract No. MOST 106-2410-H-424-020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Leisure and Recreation Management, Kainan University, Taoyuan City, 338, Taiwan

    Cheng-Shin Jang

  2. Department of Nursing, Fooyin University, Kaohsiung City, 831, Taiwan

    Ching-Ping Liang

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei City, 106, Taiwan

    Shih-Kai Chen

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  1. Cheng-Shin Jang
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  2. Ching-Ping Liang
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Correspondence to Cheng-Shin Jang.

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Jang, CS., Liang, CP. & Chen, SK. Spatial dynamic assessment of health risks for urban river cruises. Environ Monit Assess 191, 1 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-018-7122-4

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