Members of the Legionella genus find suitable conditions for their growth and survival in nuclear power plant cooling circuits. To limit the proliferation of Legionella pathogenic bacteria in nuclear power plant cooling circuits, and ensure that levels remain below regulatory thresholds, monochloramine treatment can be used. Although the treatment is highly effective, i.e. it reduces Legionella...

We have developed a procedure to test the efficiency and reliability of sequencing of Legionella pneumophila genes directly from respiratory samples and have compared the results with those derived from cultured isolates. We tried to obtain the nucleotide sequences of six protein-coding loci included in the sequence-based typing scheme for Legionella pneumophila and three intergenic regions fro...

OBJECTIVE The study was aimed at determining whether Legionella pneumophila bacteria can be found in thermal saline waters used in balneotherapy. METHODS Water samples were collected from three thermal saline baths, supplied by thermal saline waters (type Cl - Na). The total number of bacteria was determined in the direct microscopic count under a fluorescence microscope The numbers of bacter...

Chlorine and thermal treatments are the most commonly used procedures to control and prevent Legionella proliferation in drinking water systems of large buildings. However, cases of legionellosis still occur in facilities with treated water. The purpose of this work was to model the effect of temperature and free chlorine applied in similar exposure conditions as in drinking water systems on fi...

Legionella is an opportunistic pathogen of public health significance. One of the main sources of Legionella is potable water systems. As a consequence of aging populations there is an increasing demographic considered at high risk for Legionellosis and, as such, a review of the guidelines is required. Worldwide, Legionella has been detected from many potable water sources, suggesting it is ubi...

Legionella is an opportunistic waterborne pathogen of increasing public health significance. Pasteurization, otherwise known as super-heat and flush (increasing water temperature to above 70°C and flushing all outlets), has been identified as an important mechanism for the disinfection of Legionella in manufactured water systems. However, several studies have reported that this procedure was in...

BACKGROUND Currently, to our knowledge, quality of output water of dental chair units is not covered by specific regulations in the European Union, and national recommendations are heterogeneous. In Germany, water used in dental chair units must follow drinking water quality. In the United States of America, testing for aerobic heterotrophic bacteria is recommended. The present study was perfor...

After ingestion by macrophages, Legionella pneumophila enter spacious vacuoles that are quickly enveloped by endoplasmic reticulum (ER), then slowly transferred to lysosomes. Here we demonstrate that the macrophage autophagy machinery recognizes the pathogen phagosome as cargo for lysosome delivery. The autophagy conjugation enzyme Atg7 immediately translocated to phagosomes harbouring virulent...

To understand how macrophages (Mphi) activated with IFN-gamma modulate the adaptive immune response to intracellular pathogens, the interaction of IFN-gamma-treated bone marrow-derived murine Mphi (BMphi) with Legionella pneumophila was investigated. Although Legionella was able to evade phagosome lysosome fusion initially, and was capable of de novo protein synthesis within IFN-gamma-treated B...

Legionella pneumophila is involved in more than 95% cases of severe atypical pneumonia. Infection is mainly by inhalation the indoor aerosols through the water-coolant systems. Because some Legionella strains may be viable but not culturable, therefore, Taq polymerase, DNA amplification and semi-nested-PCR were carried out to detect Legionella-specific 16S-rDNA sequence. For this purpose, 1.5 l...