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. This was concluded in the ENVAQUA TechTalk 'Rapid and reliable detection of Legionella bacteria in cool- and waste water' 22nd October. Culture based methods fail in waste water. Comparing emerging technologies with certified culture methods is useless: there is not a single good reason to compare a new technology with a non-performing reference, even if that reference is certified in a different condition, being drinking water.

Emerging technologies are available and listed in the recently published American standard work 'Management of Legionella in Water Systems'. In the TechTalk we discussed qPCR, Legiolert and flowcytometry, but we are aware more technologies show promising results.

Let's give the European and Dutch legislator reasons to accelerate the application of these specific and rapid methods by applying these as early warning, risk assessment and response strategies to increased concentrations of Legionella in wwtp's.

The culture method is dead, hurray for emerging technologies! 

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