Final station for culture methods in Legionella detection in waste water #post 5
When a laboratory method is simple, robust and effective, legislators are keen to certify the method. And certification is a powerful way to guarantee reproducible results that can be used to enforce regulations. In the detection of legionella in drinking water, the culture method has been and still is the only certified method for detection. In the Netherlands, a new emerging problem has come up, being the contamination of people with Legionellose from Legionella in waste water treatment plants. Although these cases happened in 2013 and 2016, last summer the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has identified tens of waste water treatment plants to be a high risk for public health, mainly industrial plants, with animal compounds in the influent and higher temperatures (30-38 degrees Celsius). What Dutch and European societies need, is the application of emerging technologies for a rapid and reliable measurement for detection of Legionella in waste water. Thi