Monitoring for Waterborne Pathogens

Monitoring for waterborne pathogens is essential to manage delivery of safe drinking water. Additionally, understanding the fate and transport of pathogens in the environment is critical to develop catchment management approaches, to perform accurate risk-based assessments and to predict the impact of climate change on waterborne disease.
Waterborne pathogen monitoring is very challenging due to the large number of potential pathogens, the need for information rich detection processes (e.g. to discriminate between different species as well as determine viability) and the issue of sample processing to concentrate and isolate pathogens from large volumes of water.
This seminar will cover some aspects of the research we have been undertaking to tackle these challenges. We have investigated the interactions of protozoan pathogens with different polymer materials to develop filter coatings that enable higher recovery rates of pathogens during sample processing. We are also working with a range of microfluidic systems for concentration and for pathogen isolation by species and viability. A final microfluidic approach which will be covered in the seminar relates to the development of an early warning system that allows for rapid online monitoring of water supplies.