Introduction - Waterborne Pathogens: Detection Methods and Applications - page 4

of an outbreak. Furthermore, analysis of patient samples contributes
to an understanding of the disease burden and to setting appropriate
health targets. The key important factor in this type of monitoring is
the delivery of sufficient information to quantify and characterize the
pathogen load.
• Incontrast,operationalmonitoringisundertakentoprovidetimely
indications of the performance of any implemented drinking water
treatment process, enabling the possibility of taking appropriate action
to remediate any potential problems. The key factor here is rapid mea-
surements, i.e. delivering information in time for action to be taken.
According to the WHO, monitoring for pathogens is of limited use
for operational purposes as existing methods of detection take too
long. 2
• Surveillanceorverificationmonitoringprovidesinformationtoassess
the functioning of adopted WSPs and contributes to the effective man-
agement and rational allocation of resources to improve water supplies.
Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of existing, widely adopted methods
for pathogen detection, including their advantages and disadvantages. Gen-
erally, the problem with existing techniques is that the use of fecal indicator
organisms is not always correlated with pathogen presence. Therefore, while
a test may be negative for the fecal indicator, pathogens may still be present.
Additionally, while culture-based methods are cheap and easy to perform,
they are also time-consuming.
The main focus of this topic is on alternative, developing and emerging
technologies, which are presented in Chapters 5-10. This main detection
section of the topic gives background information along with an explana-
tion of how the various methods and techniques work, followed by a com-
prehensive literature review detailing how each method has been applied
to the detection of waterborne pathogens. Performance evaluation accord-
ing to a range of criteria (e.g. detection limit, ability to determine species
or viability, etc.) is provided based on information that was reported in
the literature, and at the end of each chapter a summary and comparison
are given. The introduction to this detection section explains the rationale
behind the chapter division and discusses the essential considerations for
any detection technology in this application. Chapter 11 builds on this by
considering what is required for a technology to translate from success-
ful laboratory results to widespread adoption by the water sector. A final
summary of the state-of-the-art and a future outlook are provided in
Chapter 12.