The European bathing water legislation, the 'Bathing Water Directive' was adopted in 1976. Its main objectives are to safeguard public health and protect the aquatic environment in coastal and inland areas from pollution. Bathing waters can be coastal waters, transitional waters, rivers or lakes. A revised and updated Bathing Water Directive was adopted in 2006 (1).

According to (1) the new Directive intensions are:

• to be based on scientific knowledge on protecting public health and the environment, as well as environmental management experience;
• to provide better and earlier information to citizens about quality of their bathing waters, including logos;
• to move from simple sampling and monitoring of bathing waters to bathing quality management, and
• to be integrated into all other EU measures protecting the quality of all our waters (rivers, lakes, ground waters and coastal waters) through the Water Framework Directive.

Intestinal enterococci and Escherichia coli (E. coli) are the parameters that are used to monitor and assess the quality of bathing waters and to classify them. Other parameters could be taken into account, such as the presence of cyanobacteria or microalgae (1).

Member States are obliged to monitor the bathing waters every year. The monitoring calendar should provide for at least four samples to be taken per season. The sampling interval should not be longer than one month. Upon the monitoring results gathered in four years, Member States should assess the bathing waters at the end of every season (1).

The waters are classified according to their level of quality: poor, sufficient, good or excellent, linked to clear numerical quality standards for bacteriological quality. The category "sufficient" is the minimum quality threshold that all Member States should attain by the end of the 2015 season at the latest. Where water is classified as "poor", Member States should take certain management measures, e.g. banning bathing or posting a notice advising against it, providing information to the public, and suitable corrective measures (1).

Intestinal enterococci and Escherichia coli (E. coli): are common ubiquitous bacteria in the intestines and feces of humans. They can survive for some time in the environment and have been adopted as indicators of human fecal pollution in water.