Water Quality in High-Altitude Facilities: Outcomes of Investigating a Mountain Territory of Northern Italy.

Abstract

The mountain area preparing to host the 2026 Olympic Games will benefit from an unprecedented increase in tourism, requiring local health authorities to perform additional checks to verify that the local accommodation facilities meet hygiene requirements. The focus of this investigation were the huts that, due to their intrinsic characteristics and location, cannot always access drinking water from the public aqueduct but are often fed by private sources, snowfields or rainwater. With the aim of improving the quality of these mountain huts, the microbiological quality of water intended for human consumption was investigated, and the analytical results were compared according to the relative types of supply. A statistical analysis was conducted on 41 huts that met the inclusion criteria, proving that the water drawn from the public aqueduct was of better microbiological quality than water from other sources (p-value: 0.016).