Assessment of cyanobacteria impact on bathing water quality in Poland

Introduction: Quality of bathing water is of key importance for bathers’ health, mainly due to the fact, that each year millions of people use bathing sites as places for recreation and sport activities. Most of the bathing sites are of adequate quality of water, but still there are cases of health risk because bathing water is polluted. One of the main health risk factor in bathing water are cyanobacteria and their blooms. Cyanobacteria are microorganisms of morphological features of bacteria and algae. They live in colonies, which in large quantities show up as streaks, dense foam on the water surface. The aim of this paper was to assess the impact of cyanobacteria blooms on health regarding bathing water quality in Poland. Materials and methods: Assessment covered all bathing sites in Poland supervised by Polish National Sanitary Inspection (PIS) in the period from 2007 to 2009. The base was data collected during bathing water monitoring conducted by PIS and their formal decisions of bathing bans introduced in response to revealed bathing water pollution. Results and discussion: The results of assessment indicate, that about one-fourth of all bathing bans in Poland was due to cyanobacteria blooms. Conclusions: Every fifth bathing sites located on artificial lake or water reservoir and every tenth on the sea bathing sites were polluted. Average period of bathing ban due to cyanobacteria blooms in Poland varies. Relatively the shortest bathing bans were observed on the sea bathing sites (no longer than one week on average). Much longer were bathing bans on lakes and artificial lakes (one month on average)