For those of you dealing with biological filtration for drinking water treatment, a paper entitled “Biodegradable organic matter and rapid-rate biofilter performance: A review” has just been published in the journal Water Research.
I occasionally come across papers that address the potential importance of fungi in drinking water. Many report that that fungi are surviving through treatment...
The Grand River and its tributaries in southern Ontario have been, and continue to be, very intensely studied. The latest published paper describes temporal trends in Giardia oocyst occurrence.
We’re now well aware that impacted watersheds used for drinking water can have high occurrence frequencies of protozoan pathogen (oo)cysts such as those of Giardia and Cryptosporidium. This includes the Grand River in southern Ontario where frequencies can approach 100%.
I occasionally come across papers that address the potential importance of fungi in drinking water. Many report that that fungi are surviving through treatment...
I always wondered how effective chlorination of wastewater effluent for the inactivation of viruses was (given the short proximity of some downstream drinking water treatment plants).
Finally a large scale study that confirms drinking water fluoridation prevents dental caries has been published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Unfortunately, it also confirms that those with better teeth had higher blood lead levels.
Hi all…technology is improving rapidly and real-time water quality monitoring is getting closer to being available, reliable, and affordable. A paper entitled “In-stream detection of waterborne priority pollutants, and applications in drinking water contaminant warning systems” summarizes the current status of online water monitoring and contaminant warning systems. Included is a bar chart (Fig 8) which provides [...]
Hi all…if you’ve wondered about what a cryptosporidiosis outbreak costs in a city of just over 120,000 inhabitants then you’ll be interested in this paper in the journal “Emerging Infectious Diseases.” It contains a very detailed estimate of the costs of a 2007 waterborne outbreak of Cryptosporidium hominis which occurred in Galway, western Ireland. The authors’ estimate “that the [...]
Hi all…we’re all well aware of the presence of Legionella in ‘built environments’ and their status as a human pathogen but we know very little about their presence in source water used for drinking water. A study which has just appeared in mSphere fills in some of those knowledge gaps. I found it interesting that the relative abundance [...]