Recently, significant contamination problems by residual chemicals have occasionally been occurred from major rivers and drinking water in Korea. Therefore, the management for use of them and risk assessment should be more strictly performed. In this study, we have analyzed trihalomethanes in treated water samples taken from water plants located in the region of four major rivers (i.e. Han river, Geum river, Youngsan river and Nakdong river) in Korea for eight years (1997～2004). From the data, we could assess the excess cancer risk by calculating the chronic daily intakes (CDI) multiplied by individual oral slope factors, Q₁＊, for the cancer suspected matters such as trihalomethanes, moreover the hazard index which is calculated by dividing the CDI by the acceptable daily reference dose (RfD) was determined for the risk assessment. As a result, in the case of 95 percentile excess cancer risk, it was shown that the excess cancer risk for dichlorobromomethane in the Nakdong river region is highest among the tested samples as 8.73 x 10-6. The 95 percentile total hazard index (the sum of individual hazard indices considering RfD), in addition, was below 1.0 for all samples, and therefore it was assessed that water samples taken from treatment plants of four major rivers are not harmful.
