PATHOGENS IN DRINKING WATER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

Abstract

Water borne diseases are one of the most common types of diseases found over the world caused by a variety of pathogens i.e., bacterial, viral and parasitic. As per World Health Organization (WHO) almost 22% deaths are water borne. Most of these diseases are caused due to recontamination of water in the drinking water supply networks. Although the water in urban regions of our country is cleaned in water treatment plants before being supplied to the general public there are chances that this water gets re-contaminated in the distribution networks. This may be due to development of Antibiotic Resistance Genes (ARGs). These distribution networks may also harbor the opportunistic pathogens which are potential hosts of ARGs and may lead to serious health threats to the immuno-compromised population. Further, these ARGs grow in number due to transfer between the bacterial cells via vertical as well as horizontal gene transfer. So, detection of such pathogens becomes very important. The earlier research was focused on detecting the presence of antibiotic resistance genes and opportunistic pathogens in samples taken from a laboratory scale stimulated water distribution network. Due to non- availability of access to lab the research got shifted to the computation of horizontal gene transfer of ARGs in drinking water. The data taken is obtained by testing the samples collected from IIT Roorkee water distribution network. Basically, we tried to find out the plasmid transfer rate which will in turn help us know the rate at which ARGs spread inside the water distribution network. Lastly, we conducted a statistical analysis (Spearman’s Rank Correlation Test) to understand the trends in plasmid transfer rate and the parameters which affect the levels of plasmid transfer rate.