At least 1.8 billion people worldwide use a source of drinking water that is affected by fecal contamination.
Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that E. coli is responsible for approximately 63,000 deaths each year.
Detection of E. coli in drinking water is important not only because it can be dangerous in its own right, but also because E. coli’s presence serves as a fairly reliable marker of fecal contamination, which means other pathogens could be present, too.
E. coli provides conclusive evidence of recent fecal pollution and should not be present in drinking-water.” However, E. coli detection isn’t always easy or readily available.
In particular, a type of bacteriophage called a T7 coliphage is able to infect most strains of E. coli.
Nugen and colleagues designed their ‘T7NLC’ bacteriophage so that when it finds an E. coli bacterium and commences infection, this triggers production of the NLuc luciferase, which ultimately produces light.
Thus, if the engineered bacteriophage encounters E. coli in a water sample, it will glow.
“If the test determines the presence of E. coli, then you should not be drinking the water, because it indicates possible fecal contamination,” says Nugen.
"Global Good invents and implements technologies to improve the lives of people in the developing world,” says Hinkley.
"Phage-based detection technologies have the potential to rapidly determine if a water source is safe to drink, a result that serves to immediately improve the quality of life of those in the community through the prevention of disease.” Original Research:

”You can use chlorine tablet but it depends on the water.
Chlorine tablet works 100 per cent for water from borehole.
But for muddy waters, if you use chlorine tablet, there will be first chemical reaction which will reduce the effectiveness of that chlorine tablet.
The water needs to be clean.
If the water looks muddy and you use chlorine tablet, it will not work 100 per cent.”
Achieving SDGs Yeo, who acknowledged that government had put on the table some efforts to ensure that WASH services are delivered to the people, urged state governments to adopt the federal government’s expanded WASH programme as part of the efforts to deliver WASH services in the communities.
He urged government to make policies that would facilitate access to improved water sources and sanitation, which will, in turn, help to reduce preventable diseases.
Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had reported the UNICEF on Friday, September 29 said an estimated three million children need emergency education support occasioned by the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast.
UNICEF’s deputy director, Justin Forsyth, told journalists in Maiduguri that urgent interventions were necessary to address the situation.
Forsyth said that over 57 per cent of basic and post basic schools in Borno were closed down due to the crisis caused by the Boko Haram insurgency.

”Dysentery can give you some time to take care of yourself but not cholera”.
“For a community like that, there is need for people to perform filtration or try as much as possible to boil it.
”You can use chlorine tablet but it depends on the water.
Chlorine tablet works 100 per cent for water from borehole.
But for muddy waters, if you use chlorine tablet, there will be first chemical reaction which will reduce the effectiveness of that chlorine tablet.
The water needs to be clean.
Achieving SDGs Yeo, who acknowledged that government had put on the table some efforts to ensure that WASH services are delivered to the people, urged state governments to adopt the federal government’s expanded WASH programme as part of the efforts to deliver WASH services in the communities.
He urged government to make policies that would facilitate access to improved water sources and sanitation, which will, in turn, help to reduce preventable diseases.
Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had reported the UNICEF on Friday, September 29 said an estimated three million children need emergency education support occasioned by the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast.
UNICEF’s deputy director, Justin Forsyth, told journalists in Maiduguri that urgent interventions were necessary to address the situation.

A team of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have created novel ultrafiltration membranes that considerably enhance the virus-removal process from treated municipal wastewater used for drinking in cities facing water scarcity.
Existing membrane filtration approaches require intensive energy to effectively remove pathogenic viruses without the need for chemicals like chlorine, which can pollute the water with disinfection byproducts.
The teams at UIUC and BGU joined forces on the new method for virus pathogen removal.
The research findings have been published in the current issue of Water Research.
“This is an urgent matter of public safety,” the researchers say.
“Insufficient removal of human Adenovirus in municipal wastewater, for example, has been detected as a contaminant in U.S. drinking water sources, including the Great Lakes and worldwide.” The norovirus, which can cause nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, is the most common reason for viral gastroenteritis in humans, and is assessed to be the second leading cause of gastroenteritis-associated mortality.
In the research, Prof. Moshe Herzberg of the Department of Desalination and Water Treatment in the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at BGU and his team grafted a unique hydrogel coating onto a commercial ultrafiltration membrane.
It comprises of both positive and negative charges and increases efficiency by weakening virus buildup on the modified filter surface.
Prof. Nguyen, Department of Chemical Engineering, UIUC Prof. Herzberg and his student, Maria Piatkovsky, worked on this groundbreaking research with Prof. Thanh H. Nguyen and her student, Ruiqing Lu, Department of Chemical Engineering, UIUC as well as Professor Dr. Mathias Ulbricht, chair of Technical Chemistry II, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
The project was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA grant RD83582201-0) and the German-Israeli Water Technology Cooperation Program, which is funded by the Ministry of Science & Technology of Israel and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF-MOST, BMBF grant # 02WA1261B, MOST grant # GR-2394).

A study led by UC Santa Cruz researchers has found that drought dramatically increases the severity of West Nile virus epidemics in the United States, although populations affected by large outbreaks acquire immunity that limits the size of subsequent epidemics.
The study, published February 8 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, involved researchers from UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, and the New York State Department of Health.
They analyzed 15 years of data on human West Nile virus infections from across the United States and found that epidemics were much larger in drought years and in regions that had not suffered large epidemics in the past.
"We found that drought was the dominant weather variable correlated with the size of West Nile virus epidemics," said first author Sara Paull, who led the study as a post-doctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and is now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
In the new study, Paull and Marm Kilpatrick, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, analyzed patterns in the number of severe West Nile virus infections each year in each state and nationally.
Model projections indicated that increased drought could double the size of future West Nile virus epidemics, but that outbreaks would be limited to regions that have yet to sustain large numbers of cases.
"Drought identified as key to severity of West Nile virus epidemics: Study finds transmission of West Nile virus is higher in drought years, but after large outbreaks acquired immunity limits the size of subsequent epidemics."
ScienceDaily, 7 February 2017.
Drought identified as key to severity of West Nile virus epidemics: Study finds transmission of West Nile virus is higher in drought years, but after large outbreaks acquired immunity limits the size of subsequent epidemics.
"Drought identified as key to severity of West Nile virus epidemics: Study finds transmission of West Nile virus is higher in drought years, but after large outbreaks acquired immunity limits the size of subsequent epidemics."

Wheat virus crosses over, harms native grasses.
New research shows, however, that a common wheat virus can spread and harm perennial native grasses.
In the current issue of the Journal of Ecology, researchers from Michigan State University, University of Kansas and University of Virginia show that farmers and scientists need to think about how best to protect native plants from diseases emanating from crops.
"Crop fields were once considered tiny islands in a sea of wild vegetation, so farmers and scientists focused on protecting crops from wild pathogens," said Carolyn Malmstrom, MSU plant biologist and co-lead author of the study.
"Now, around the world, the situation has reversed, and diseases from agricultural fields affect not only crops, but also substantially harm native plants, such as switchgrass."
"Crops have been bred for yield, sometimes at the cost of plant defense.
If they are susceptible, fast-growing crops can serve as highly competent hosts that amplify viruses within a region," Malmstrom said.
While the study focused on merely one virus, it shows that science needs to catch up in understanding how crops influence native plants and to build more knowledge of virus ecology in general.
"There are many mysteries surrounding how crop viruses affect natural ecosystems," Malmstrom said.
"It’s important that we build a base of research in this area.

Study finds small public wells in Minnesota have viruses, bacteria.
ST. PAUL — Bacteria and viruses that could make people sick have been discovered in small public drinking water wells across the state, according to a report released Friday by the Minnesota Department of Health.
The study, ordered by the state Legislature in 2014, found that, while the overall presence of microbial indicators in samples was low, a high percentage of wells had at least one detection.
But 37 percent of systems had DNA-like evidence of human viruses and 89 percent of systems had evidence of microbes, including some that don’t cause human illness, detected at least once.
They also don’t know if there is any widespread human health risk for people drinking from wells that test positive — whether people drinking that water are getting sick.
“That’s part of the work we still have to do: looking at the wells, potential sources of contamination and other factors, and figuring out how the contamination is occurring and what can be done about it.” None of the wells involved serve municipal water supply systems — those larger systems require treatment to kill viruses and bacteria.
There are about 1,500 of those small, public systems across the state that don’t treat their water, officials said Friday.
Finding such evidence of microbes in a drinking water system does not necessarily mean that those consuming water from these systems would become ill. “We continue to analyze the results of the study to get a better sense of the potential risk,” said Paul Allwood, assistant state health commissioner, in a statement Friday.
The 2014 Minnesota Legislature directed the Health Department to conduct a groundwater virus monitoring project using funding from the state’s Clean Water Fund.
The Health Department recommends that both public and private water systems continue to maintain their wells and conduct routine testing of their water supply.

One year into a two-year study requested by state lawmakers, scientists with the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) report finding evidence of genetic material, like DNA, from viruses and bacteria in water from some of the state’s public water supply wells.
Finding such evidence of microbes in a drinking water system does not necessarily mean that those consuming water from these systems would become ill, but it does indicate the system may be vulnerable to contamination, according to a news release.
Health officials will now work with systems to determine how to reduce potential contamination.
The project has two components: a monitoring study divided into two phases and a community illness study.
In the first phase of the monitoring study, MDH looked at how often microbes were detected in groundwater by sampling source water from the wells of 82 systems.
The second phase of the monitoring study, scheduled to be completed by this summer, includes wells with different characteristics than the wells in the first phase.
However, 37 percent of systems had evidence of human viruses and 89 percent of systems had evidence of microbes (including some that don’t cause human illness) detected at least once during the study period, according to health officials.
In the next several months, MDH and project partners will complete an analysis of all study results including the community illness study.
After completion of the study, MDH will work with systems to determine what recommendations might be warranted to ensure public health.
“Understanding how they get into aquifers and wells may help us find a cost-effective way to predict problems and take preventive action.” MDH recommends that both public and private water systems continue to maintain their wells and conduct routine testing of their water supply, and to follow recommended procedures for operating and maintaining septic systems or other contaminant sources.