WaterNajia

Probabilistic water safety assessments

Authors

  • Najia Ahmad 786-MIII
    Competing Interests

    None

Keywords:

Water, Health

Abstract

Will a browser-based Bayesian risk engine give probabilistic water safety assessments calibrated to regional bacteria prevalence (for low-resource settings)? We built WaterNajia as a 1,784-line single-file application implementing logit-scale risk scoring. It uses Monte Carlo simulation across 15 environmental and infrastructure risk factors for six water source types. The engine utilises exponential decay modelling for time-since-contamination events, factor-group exclusivity logic, and region-specific bacteria prevalence priors derived from WHO and UNICEF surveillance data. For the full risk stack scenario with piped water, the posterior contamination probability was 0.92 (95% credible interval 0.87 to 0.96). This used 200 Monte Carlo samples with seed-deterministic XorShift128Plus pseudorandom generation. A parallel Rust and WebAssembly implementation achieved bit-exact agreement with the JavaScript reference across all five golden test vectors. Real-time probabilistic water safety scoring could then support field-level decision-making in humanitarian and public health contexts. The risk model relies on aggregate regional prevalence data. It cannot capture hyperlocal contamination sources or seasonal variation.

Github link below

https://github.com/Najia-Ahmad/Water-Safety-Risk-Engine

References

1. Hamouda, M. A., Anderson, N. W., & Huang, R. R. (2018). "A decision support system for assessing the risk of waterborne disease outbreaks." Journal of Environmental Management.

2. Souter, P. F., et al. (2003). "Evaluation of a low-cost, point-of-use combined coagulation-flocculation-disinfection treatment of polluted water." Applied and Environmental Microbiology. (In conjunction with newer literature on WASH-GIS and mobile health (mHealth) integration).

Visual abstract

Published

2026-04-06 — Updated on 2026-04-12

Versions

Issue

Section

E156 Research Letter

How to Cite

WaterNajia: Probabilistic water safety assessments. (2026). Synthesis, 2(2). https://synthesis-medicine.org/index.php/journal/article/view/34 (Original work published 2026)

Similar Articles

31-37 of 37

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.