Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Microsporidium are harder to detect with the current methods,
due to the small size of their spore. Although,
34
Microsporidium was
detectable from drinking water treatment and wastewater treatment
plants using Weber's stain. Identification of the species, however, was not
possible and currently relies on PCR methodology with primers spe-
cific for
Enterocytozoon bieneusi
,
Encephalitozoon intestinalis
,
Encephalitozoon
hellum
or
Encephalitozoon cuniculi
for specific identification.
34
This tech-
nique, however, does not assess viability.
3.5. SUMMARY
This chapter has presented the guidelines and regulations which aim
to ensure resource effective delivery of safe drinking water. Monitoring
plays key roles in the design and implementation of WSPs and the different
types of monitoring have been described. It is clear that different techniques
are more appropriate to certain types of monitoring, and that existing tech-
nologies need improvement to enable wider application in all areas, espe-
cially in operational monitoring. One question this topic will address is
what new detection methods are available or developing, which could meet
this need and will assess the current state-of-the-art, to help us form a judg-
ment about how feasible the vision really is of networked sensors reporting
on microbial aspects of a water supply for operational decision making. Is
this something we might see in the next 10 years or the next 50 years?
This chapter has presented the existing detection technology, based on
indicator monitoring, and has highlighted many of the drawbacks and short-
coming of this approach. However, this is a well established, widely adopted
method that is relatively cheap and easy to use. Therefore, new methods will
have to offer significant advantages and be available at reasonable cost for
water sector adoption. This topic is covered further in Chapter 11.
This chapter has also described direct detection of various classes of
pathogens. Both the existing culture and microscopy based detection
approaches as well as emerging molecular methods, which have been
explored for a wide range of pathogens, have been mentioned.
At several points throughout this chapter, the sampling and sample pro-
cessing part of monitoring have been highlighted as key to the recovery rate
and the detection limits achieved. Therefore, Chapter 4 will describe the
state-of-the-art in sample processing for waterborne pathogen monitor-
ing before the detection section, which focuses on new detection methods
(Chapters 5-10).
Search WWH ::
Custom Search