Take Part – Study into Health Impacts of Marine Pollution

Surfers Against Sewage has teamed up with the European Centre for the Environment & Human Health (Exeter University Medical School) to produce a study to help identify the health risks associated with exposure to marine pollution. And we need your help!

Please complete survey today.

The survey will help to assess the accuracy of current water quality monitoring procedures. The current sampling strategy involves taking on average one water sample from each beach once a week during the bathing season, which typically runs from 15th May to 30th September each year. Yet water quality at a single beach can vary enormously throughout the day and at different points along the length of a beach.

The more data we have, the more robust our findings will be to support our ongoing clean water initiatives. Over recent years concern about the cleanliness of coastal water and its possible adverse effects on health has led to tighter regulations and monitoring of seawater at popular beaches. Yet, new standards are about to come into force and a shocking 10% of the UK’s bathing waters are predicted to fail.

Please take the 5 minutes to fill in the short online survey. All the data will be treated as confidential and the questionnaire covers your health, visits to the beach and the activities you have undertaken at the beach.

To ensure we have a good control group we need to hear from you even if you haven’t been to the beach or used the sea in the last few weeks. Complete the survey here.

The survey will be going live from 2nd June 2014 for two weeks.