In my quest to find new and interesting topics in drinking water research this is the first study I’ve come across on dishwashers. No municipality that I’m aware of is responsible for appliances connected to distributed networks.
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 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).
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 [...]
Hi all…just when I thought we had a pretty good handle on protozoan pathogens, a new survey in Shanghai reveals that there are new species being identified in wastewater and combined sewer overflows. Not only are there some such as Enterocytozoon bieneusi that aren’t monitored for in North America but there are new species of Cryptosporidium and Giardia which in some cases [...]
Hi all…a new review on monitoring for opportunistic pathogens in premise plumbing has appeared in the journal ‘Water Research’. It includes information on bacterial pathogens (notably Legionella) but it also deals with a couple of protozoans including Naegleria fowleri which is the causative agent of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, a rare but particularly lethal disease with a very low [...]
Hi all…nitrate and nitrate in drinking water have been regulated for quite some time now (Health Canada guidelines: MAC = 10 mg/L measured as nitrate-nitrogen and 1 mg/L measured as nitrite-nitrogen). The primary concern which led to regulations/guidelines is methaemoglobinemia and not a cancer endpoint. A recent study concludes long-term ingestion of elevated nitrate in drinking water [...]