OBJECTIVE To estimate and compare contamination rates of three different urine-sampling methods in pregnant women to assess bacteriuria. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, 113 pregnant women collected three different midstream urine samples consecutively: morning (first void); midstream (void without further instructions); and clean-catch sample (void after cleaning). The following end po...

Water quality data collection in shallow water areas can be a challenging task. Obstacles encountered in such environments include difficulty in covering large territories and the presence of inaccessible areas due to a variety of reasons such as a soft bottom or contamination. There is also a high probability of disturbing the test area while placing the sensors. This paper describes a NASA-fu...

Atrazine has been identified in at least 20 of the 1,636 hazardous waste sites that have been proposed for inclusion on the EPA National Priorities List (NPL) (HazDat 2003). However, the number of sites evaluated for atrazine is not known. The frequency for these sites within the United States can be seen in Figure 6-1. Of these sites, all 20 are located within the United States and none are lo...

Abstract. Balloon-borne water vapour measurements in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) by means of frost point hygrometers provide important information on air chemistry climate. However, risk contamination from sublimating hydrometeors collected intake tube may render these unusable, particularly after crossing low clouds containing supercooled droplets. A large set (sub)trop...

Contaminated soils are widespread and contamination is known to impact several biotic soil processes. But it still not clear what extent affects carbon efflux (CO 2 ) occurring through microfauna respiration. Regarding the large stocks of organic (Corga) stored in soils, even limited changes outputs fluxes may modify atmospheric CO concentration with important feedbacks on climate. In this stud...

This paper presents a statistical comparison of three cloud retrieval products of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site from 1998 to 2006: MICROBASE, University of Utah (UU), and University of North Dakota (UND) products. The probability density functions of the various cloud liquid water content (LWC) retrievals appear to be consistent with...

Three tributaries of the Grand River watershed (Ontario, Canada), each representing different watershed types (urban, agricultural/rural, and mixed land-use) were examined to understand the spatial, temporal, and host-source distribution of the waterborne pathogen, Cryptosporidium. Cryptosporidium was frequently found throughout the study (73%, 65/89) with occurrence and concentrations observed...

Washing procedures applied to fresh produce have the potential to reduce contamination from the surface of the product. However, the wash water may also serve as a source of contamination or has great potential to result in cross-contamination. The objective of this study was to evaluate process handling cross-contamination potential and pathogen removal of initially low numbers of attached cel...

A particular challenge to water safety in populous intertropical regions is the lack of reliable faecal indicators to detect microbiological contamination of water, while the numerical relationships of specific viral indicators remain largely unexplored. The aim of this study was to investigate the numerical relationships of FRNA-bacteriophage genotypes, adenovirus 41, and human adenoviruses (H...