Acta Trop. 2012 Jun 16.
Practical Surveillance of Water Quality in a Low-Resource Setting: a pilot program.
Chang K, Greeley C. School of Medicine, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX.
Diarrheal diseases represent a tremendous health burden in low-resource countries affecting child mortality. The main sources of diarrheal diseases are water source contamination and fecal-oral transmission. A major obstacle in disease control is the ability to identify and monitor water source quality for potential infectious contamination.
We explore a technique for real-time surveillance of coliform bacteria contamination in water sources which is of modest cost and does not require electricity. Specifically, we used body heat as a source for thermal regulation in contrast to traditional incubation for the enumeration of coliforms on 3M petrifilm™E.coli/Coliform count plates.
Our data support that the body heat incubation technique is a promising strategy for water source surveillance in low resource settings.
