S10: The microbiology of the coupled human-water cycle: emerging pathogens and water safety

According to research, there are estimates of ~19 Million waterborne illnesses per year for community water systems in the US with 5.4 Million illnesses from groundwater and 13 Million illnesses from surface water systems. That includes diarrhea, colds, skin infections, meningitis, and even chronic conditions like myocarditis and neurological problems including joint pains.   

Microbial genomic studies of water are beginning to emerge and provide a picture of the immense biological communities that are found in wastewater, freshwater, and biofilms in water distribution systems.   This has enhanced the descriptions of  organisms that are present in the environment based on the major taxonomic groups and in some cases the identification of some key hazards, especially the pathogenic microbial biome are described.  Metagenomic analyses of viruses in wastewater and freshwater environments have revealed that only 40% of the sequences had significant similarity to known sequences and while around 30 families were identified, the majority of nucleic acid sequences recovered could not be matched in similarity to what is in the current databases.  Our recent work with new instrumentation has discovered more identifiable human virus sequences in sewage including four families of bacteriophage with and without culture techniques.   Molecular biological advances and the explosion of genomic data sets which have been facilitated by new instruments offer powerful approaches to improve the understanding of the microbial world and “safe” waters.  This includes the use of quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) to identify sources, exposure and eventually risk.