Water-Borne Pathogens

Chair: Dr. Ron Turco
Purdue University

This half-day workshop will concentrate on defining the state-of-the-art in detection, identification and tracking of pathogens in secondary habitats/environments. The workshop will provide basic information about the environmental fate and behavior of pathogens, information on current and proposed detection and tracking methods as well as real-life examples of the use of the methods. This will be accomplished in six steps: the initial presentation will provide general information about behavior of pathogens in the environment; the second presentation will supply information about pathogen recovery and enumeration methods; the third talk will offer a comparison of molecular fingerprinting methods while the fourth talk will provide a more detailed discussion of pathogen detection with an emphasis on library dependent and –independent methodology. The fifth talk will provide examples of actual bacterial source tracking studies as well as a discussion of limitations including statistical issues. The session will be finalized with a panel discussion based around audience input and questions collected from the EPInet website. The oral program will be followed by a poster session focusing on pathogens in the environment. All information, including the panel discussion will be available on the EPInet website.

E-mail: rturco@purdue.edu