Removal efficiencies and attachment coefficients for Cryptosporidium in sandy alluvial riverbank sediment.

Riverbank filtration has been shown to be effective for removing viable Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts. Drinking water systems that employ riverbank filtration may receive additional treatment credits beyond that which they can obtain using traditional engineering approaches. In order to develop guidance for removal effectiveness, screening level predictive modeling by colloid filtration theory combined with advection and dispersion modeling is potentially useful. Currently, only few studies have measured basic effective colloid filtration parameters for Cryptosporidium oocysts with naturally occurring riverbank sediments. In the focus of this study we conducted flow column experiments in triplicate and measured effective attachment rate coefficients for sandy river sediments of the Southern Great Plains which are low in organic matter. We found that for sediment sampled from these high-energy rivers there was no apparent dependency of C. parvum removal with carbon content, bacterial colony forming units, or with gross texture properties of the sands. The differences in particle size distribution for the sediments suggested that straining did not play a role in removal efficiency. First-order colloid attachment rate coefficients followed lognormal distribution functions. The coefficients also appeared to be unrelated to the differences in particle size distributions of the sediments, bacterial counts, or levels of total carbon or total organic carbon. Using Monte Carlo analyses, the lowest observed 5th percentile was 8.0 x 10(-6) min(-1) and the highest observed 95th percentile was 1.6 x 10(-3). Total log(10) removals ranged from 23 to 200 m(-1). These results have application for screening level colloid filtration modeling of riverbank filtration in these systems.

Fecal source tracking by antibiotic resistance analysis on a watershed exhibiting low resistance.

The ongoing development of microbial source tracking has made it possible to identify contamination sources with varying accuracy, depending on the method used. The purpose of this study was to test the efficiency of the antibiotic resistance analysis (ARA) method under low resistance by tracking the fecal sources at Turkey Creek, Oklahoma exhibiting this condition. The resistance patterns of 772 water-isolates, tested with nine antibiotics, were analyzed by discriminant analysis (DA) utilizing a five-source library containing 2250 isolates. The library passed various representativeness tests; however, two of the pulled-sample tests suggested insufficient sampling. The resubstitution test of the library individual sources showed significant isolate misclassification with an average rate of correct classification (ARCC) of 58%. These misclassifications were explained by low antibiotic resistance (Wilcoxon test P < 0.0001). Seasonal DA of stream E. coli isolates for the pooled sources human/livestock/deer indicated that in fall, the human source dominated (P < 0.0001) at a rate of 56%, and that human and livestock respective contributions in winter (35 and 39%), spring (43 and 40%), and summer (37 and 35%) were similar. Deer scored lower (17-28%) than human and livestock at every season. The DA was revised using results from a misclassification analysis to provide a perspective of the effect caused by low antibiotic resistance and a more realistic determination of the fecal source rates at Turkey Creek. The revision increased livestock rates by 13-14% (0.04

The influence of redox potential on the degradation of halogenated methanes.

To determine the influence of redox potential on the reaction mechanism and to quantify kinetics of the dechlorination by digester sludge, the test compounds trichlorofluoromethane (CFCl3), carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), and chloroform (CHCl3) were incubated in the presence of sludge and variable concentrations of reducing agent. Different sources of dehalogenation were examined, including live sludge and heat-killed sludge, and abiotic mechanisms were quantified in the absence of sludge. Batch incubations were done under redox conditions ranging from +/-534 to -348 mV. The highest rates for the dehalogenation of the three compounds were observed at -348 mV. The dechlorination rate of all the compounds by the heat-resistant catalysts was approximately twofold higher than the live treatments. It was proposed that the higher degradation rates by heat-killed sludge were due to the absence of physical barriers such as cell wall and cell membranes. There was no abiotic dechlorination of CFCl3, whereas CCl4 and CHCl3 were both reduced in the absence of sludge catalyst by Ti (III) citrate at > or =2.5 mM. The degradation pathways of CFCl3 and CHCl3 appeared to be only partially reductive since the production of reduced metabolites was low in comparison with the total amount of original halogenated compounds degraded. For CFCl3, the partial reductive degradation implied that different intra- and extracellular pathways were concurrent. The Gibbs free energy and the redox potential for the dehalogenation reactions utilizing Ti (III) citrate and acetate as electron donors are reported here for the first time.