Water is a natural resource of vital importance to living beings, but due to anthropic action several microorganisms are disseminated into aquatic environments. In developing countries, over one billion people do not have access to clean, properly treated water and approximately three billion people do not have access to adequate sanitary facilities (Kraszewski et al., 2001) This scenery is pro...

Thousands and thousands of people are suffering from the toxic effect of arsenic in many countries. It is due to natural ground water contamination as well as industrial hazards waste and drainage problems. Permissible level of arsenic in water is 0.01 ppb defined by World Health Organization. The delta region of Brahmaputra and Ganga is one of the world’s most affected areas. The central porti...

BACKGROUND Drinking water contaminated by chemicals or pathogens is a major public health threat in the developing world. Responses to this threat often require water consumers (households or communities) to improve their own management or treatment of water. One approach hypothesized to increase such positive behaviors is increasing knowledge of the risks of unsafe water through the disseminat...

this study was carried out to investigate the occurrence of potentially pathogenic species of vibrio in sea water and estuarine environments of the caspian sea in the golestan province of iran. a total of 127 water samples from coastal waters as well as from river and estuaries were collected and analyzed by culture, during april and september 2001. following prompt centrifugation, the resuspen...

Worldwide, contaminated drinking water poses a major health threat, particularly to child development. Diarrhoea represents a large part of the water-related disease burden and enteric infections have been linked to nutritional and growth shortfalls as well as long-term physical and cognitive impairment in children. Previous studies detailed the frequency of infection and the consequences for c...

Drinking water for human health and well-being is crucial. Accidental and intentional water contamination can pose great danger to consumers. Optimal design of a system that can quickly detect the presence of contamination in a water distribution network is very challenging for technical and operational reasons. However, on the one hand improvement in chemical and biological sensor technology h...

cation rates are staggering and greatly exceed the amounts absorbed by plants. For example, the average amount of nitrogen applied to corn in the Midwest is approximately 160 kg/hectare/year, and in California > 200 kg/hectare/year is added to more than 3 million cultivated hectares [U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) 1991, 2003]. The geochemical fate of this excess nitrate is complex, but i...

Contamination of weaning foods and water with enteropathogenic micro-organisms has been recognised in the past, but its link with the development of diarrhoea by young children in developing countries is lacking. This may explain the unavailability of effective interventions to reduce the risk of diarrhoeal diseases from this contamination. The frequency of contamination of weaning foods with e...

The faecal contamination of drinking water sources can lead to waterborne disease outbreaks. To estimate a potential risk for waterborne infections caused by faecal contamination of drinking water sources, knowledge of the pathogen concentrations in raw water is required. We suggest a novel approach to estimate pathogen concentrations in a drinking water source by using microbial source trackin...