Drinking water quality indices: A systematic review

Abstract

This analysis applied systematic review as a methodology for identifying, analyzing and interpreting data on the use of water quality indices for human consumption. Scientific articles were searched in the “PubMed”, “Scielo”, “ScienceDirect” and “Web of Science” databases, using the keywords “drinking water” and “water quality index”, with a custom interval between 2000 and 2020. The results indicated 82,573 published articles, with 16 of them being selected after a filtering process. The occurrence of 11 water quality indices was verified, including 47 water quality parameters used to assess the quality of drinking water, highlighting that the parameters pH, Nitrate, Turbidity, Chloride and Sulfate were the most used, cited in 10 of the 16 articles selected (62,5%). We suggest that future studies seek to propose regionalized water quality indicators for consumption, in order to consider local aspects in the evaluation process and to determine intervention priorities by health surveillance agencies.