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Partners:
CIHR,
NSERC-IRC, AAFC, EC, HC, PHAC, Beef and Cattle Inductries Development Funds,
Noth Okanagan Cattleman Association.
Summary:
Safe drinking water is vital to the human health. The major health risk with
drinking water is caused by microbial contamination of source water of
unknown origin. As an increasing number of Canadian communities are being
exposed to various land use (e.g., livestock farming, manure application,
agriculture, recreation, sewage, septic and manure inputs), the risks of
drinking water contamination with fecal bacteria (especially E. coli) is
increasing rapidly. In addition to Walkerton and North Battleford tragedies,
hundreds of Canadian communities live through frequent boil water
advisories. Standard methods for monitoring fecal bacterial contamination
cannot identify the sources thereby making it difficult to remedy the
problem and prevent reoccurrence of contamination. We will take comparative
and experimental approaches using molecular, microbiological, biochemical
and environmental methods for efficient and accurate tracking of fecal
bacterial origins in source water and to predict contamination, transport
and viability under variable environmental conditions. To reduce health
risks caused by bacterial pathogens in drinking water we need to address the
following critical needs: a) Development and validation of different methods
in tracking the sources of E. coli contamination; b) Assessment of the
impacts of various land-use activities on fecal contamination of source
water; and c) Assessment and modeling environmental regulators of transport,
viability and outbreak potentials of E. coli. We will apply and validate the
following bacterial source tracking methods to fecal coliform bacteria: 1)
bacterial source tracking with ribosomal RNA (rDNA) typing; 2) comparative
genomics using gene array; 3) DNA characterisation of Bacterioides
genes, and 3) Antibiotic resistance profiling.
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