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THE INCREASING NEED FOR SURVEILLANCE: WATER SOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Citation:
Lindquist, H.D A. THE INCREASING NEED FOR SURVEILLANCE: WATER SOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS. Presented at Symposium 30: Emerging Food- and Water-borne Protozoan Parasites. 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygene, Denver, CO, November 10-14, 2002.
Impact/Purpose:
1) Refine new, practical methods for the detection of CCL-related and emerging waterborne human protozoa.
2) Perform field tests of devices or methods that have been developed under this task.
3) Evaluate these methods or devices in a variety of water matrices and parasite concentrations.
This work in this task supports CCL2 and 3 and is expected to be completed by 9/07.
Description:
The outbreaks of giardiosis in the 1980's and the outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Milwaukee, have demonstrated the susceptibility of public water supplies to contamination with protozoan parasites. Many protozoan parasites are resistant to the levels of residual disinfectant remaining after water treatment. Therefore, if parasitic transmission stages are passed through an initial treatment system, the remaining disinfectant residual may not be sufficient to ensure public safety. Thus, it is imperative that treatment be matched to the severity of the contamination of the source water. Highly contaminated source water must be treated in a manner that is efficacious in inactivating and removing protozoan transmission stages. To determine the level of contamination of source water, several methods have been used or proposed. In addition, the list of protozoa to be detected is also growing, as the incidence of disease from waterborne transmission of a variety of protozoa increases. The methods used to detect protozoa in water have included the Information Collection Rule Method and EPA Method 1623. Other technologies that are being investigated for the detection of protozoa in the environment include molecular methods such as fluorescent in situ hybridization probes, and polymerase chain reaction based assays.