Preliminary Evaluation of the Content of Heavy Metals in Rural Aqueducts of the District of TonosÍ, Province of Los Santos, Panama

Heavy metals may be required by living organisms as micronutrients while others have no equivalent role and are harmful even at very low concentrations. Its wide distribution in nature is one of the causes of great impacts on human health. In Panama, 20% of the population does not receive potable water and must resort to rural aqueducts that obtain water from surface catchments or from underground aquifers that are managed by the community itself. Of these, the quality of the water supplied by the rural aqueducts is unknown, because the Technical Regulation DGNTI-COPANIT 23-395-99, which regulates the characteristics of drinking water in the country, does not apply to these. By not knowing the quality, the presence of contaminants such as heavy metals, pathogens and other types of microorganisms is also a concern. The purposes of this study are: to characterize the content of heavy metals in rural aqueducts of the District of Tonosí, to determine the presence of organisms in the waters of these rural aqueducts through ATP testing and to select sites for a future abundance characterization study distribution and diversity of heavy metal resistance genes present in the microbiome of the groundwater sources that supply the rural aqueducts of the District of Tonosí, using a metagenomic approach.