Animal Waste, Water Quality and Human Health

that fall outside of these designations. Regulations, policies and guidelines, whileprotective and a necessary component of exposure intervention, therefore, must becomplemented and strengthened by public education initiatives to provide thegreatest positive impact.8.3.4 Public health educationExposure interventions 293Managing people via educational measures should be complementary to managingresources (farms and livestock) and physical environmental management.Managing human behaviour is crucial to the reduction or elimination ofwaterborne disease. Public education can take many forms. Printed materialssuch as fact sheets, brochures, signs, billboards, and informative pieces in thepopular press are frequently employed. Other successful public educationinitiatives sometimes utilize mass media: radio, television, dramatizations, andcomputer-based applications. Classroom presentations and one-on-onecounseling may also prove effective in eliciting the desired change in personalor professional practices. Specific campaigns can be initiated by national orlocal authorities, community or environmental interest groups and annualperformance tables can provide platforms for continual assessment of progressand repeat messages.Local authorities often combine efforts with environmental interest groupsor academic institutions to provide public education. The University of RhodeIsland Cooperative Extension has developed, jointly with authorities of thetown of North Kingstown, Rhode Island (US), a series of fact sheets, posters, andface-to-face trainings to educate owners of livestock on small acreages aboutprotecting water quality and human health (Burdett and Sullivan 2005, Online:http://www.uri.edu/ce/healthylandscapes/livestock/livestock_publications.htm;Burdett et al. 2009).Academic institutions may also have a role to play by offeringmulti-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate coursework on the impact ofwaterborne zoonoses. Adequate preparation (work place training and education)of those entering professional positions will increase awareness amongstqualified veterinary personnel, public health and human health care workers inorder to facilitate inter-disciplinary discussions, collaborative ventures andadequate primary prevention and health care to both human recipients andanimal hosts (Cripps 2000). The development of educational campaigns mustalso be couched in terms of the norms of the population in which sustainablehabitual changes are desired. The prevention of waterborne zoonoses isfrequently hampered by cultural traditions of long standing such as slaughteringand cooking, religious, and personal hygiene activities. The inability to address