Wed, 2015-01-14

Abstract

Microbiological water contaminants represent an acute health risk in drinking water. There are a wide variety of bacteria and viruses that can potentially be found in drinking water resulting from either an attack or a natural contamination incident. Whatever the origin of the contamination, rapid identification is needed to ensure water quality and subsequent citizen safety. Currently, various detection and identification methods exist, but they are mostly time-consuming and unsuited to emergent harmful micro-organisms. New developments are occurring to deal with this concern.
In this desk study, the main basic technologies to identify pathogens (such as immunological and genetic methods as well as mass spectrometry, microarrays and physical approaches) are reported, as well as their applications in the drinking water area. Then, some promising technologies under development are presented, especially integrated tools or new concepts in mass spectrometry. However, bottlenecks still exist, such as sample preparation or live and dead pathogen discrimination. Additionally, different projects founded by the European Commission are briefly reported in this study, as they allow a clear vision of the scientific teams and networks working on this concern.
Finally, European standards are being established as well as national initiatives that currently remain unofficial.

Wed, 2014-06-25

Abstarct

Water quality is a critical factor to public health worldwide. Accidents in past and present documented the vulnerability of our water supply chain. Therefore fast, reliable, sensitive and cheap water-monitoring systems are needed, working independently at a low level of maintenance and hands on time. Today there are only limited technologies to monitor pathogenic agents available on the market. The following review should give an overview about the major technologies being developed and evaluated today and could have potential as monitoring systems in the near future.

Fri, 2014-05-02

Abstarct

During last years, the increase of concerns about the fact that possible deliberated or accidental contaminations reach the final consumer, has contributed to early warning systems to become a good alternative for water managers. An early warning system is an integrated system for on-line monitoring, collecting data, analysing, interpreting, and communicating monitored data, which can then be used to make decisions early enough to protect public health and the environment, and to minimize unnecessary concern and inconvenience to the public.

Fri, 2014-05-02

Abstract

This report offers a brief overview of the existing methods for non-targeted screening of organic compounds,in water samples by means of mass spectrometry. This review is thus based on the studies and,exploration that can be performed by different mass spectrometry approaches.