# 273
Today Bloomberg is reporting that scientists at Cornell University have studied the H5N2 low-pathogenic virus, a less virulent cousin of the H5N1 bird flu virus, and have determined that water and sewage treatment facilities will likely kill the pathogen.
Bird Flu Viruses Unlikely to Endure Water Treatment, Study Says
By Jason Gale
Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Bird flu viruses are unlikely to survive sewerage and drinking water treatment systems, making it doubtful contaminated feces could infect plant workers and spread through tap water, scientists at Cornell University said.
The researchers studied a low-pathogenic H5N2 avian influenza virus, which they said resembles the lethal H5N1 strain circulating in Asia and Africa. Water treatments, including chlorination, ultraviolet radiation and bacterial digesters killed the microbes, said Araceli Lucio-Forster, a microbiologist at Ithaca, New York-based Cornell.
The finding may reduce concerns about drinking water as a mode of infection during a pandemic. World health officials say the H5N1 flu virus, which has killed 157 people since 2003, may spark a global outbreak if it mutates to become as infectious to humans as seasonal flu.
While the discerning reading will quickly pick up on the number of qualifiers in the story, words and phrases like `unlikely’, `making it doubtful’, and `may reduce concerns’, the underlying message is that while it is by no means a certainty, these processes appear to destroy the virus.
We learned during the SARS outbreak in 2003, that residents of Hong Kong's Amoy Gardens housing complex contracted Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome from faulty plumbing, and that the virus could apparently live in feces for hours. There are suspicions, as yet unproven, that the avian flu virus may be transmitted through bodily fluids, and so concerns over fecal contamination are understandable.
Since the H5N1 virus is so virulent, it is impossible to conduct tests using it, and so a surrogate virus, the H5N2 virus was used. How the H5N1 virus would differ in these environments is unknown.
Here in the United States there are over 50,000 water and sewage treatment plants, ranging in size from huge municipal facilities, to small community plants that service a few hundred homes. There are simply too many variables here to make sweeping statements. Scientists certainly can’t use a similar virus, and a `typical’ wastewater treatment plant, and make absolute statements regarding what would happen in the real world.
So the qualifiers are understandable, if not exactly comforting.
I’m going to file this under the heading of `potential good news’, simply because we’ve had so little to put in that category. And this assumes that the treatment plants will be fully operational and have the chemicals required.
Still, if a pandemic comes, I’ll be boiling my drinking water, until we know for sure.
