Thermal and water source effects upon the stability of enteroviruses in surface freshwaters

Abstract

The long-term survival of three human enterovirus serotypes, Coxsackievirus B3, echovirus 7, and poliovirus 1 was examined in samples of surface freshwater collected from five sites of physically different character. These were an artificial lake created by damming a creek, a small groundwater outlet pond, both a large- and a medium-sized river, and a small suburban creek. Survival was studied at temperatures of −20, 1, and 22 °C. The average amount of viral inactivation was 6.50–7.0 log10 units over 8 weeks at 22 °C, 4–5 log10 units over 12 weeks at 1 °C, and 0.4–0.8 log10 units over 12 weeks at −20 °C. The effect of incubation temperature upon viral inactivation rate was statistically significant (p < 0.00001). As determined by pairing tests, survival was also significantly related to both viral serotype and water source at each of the three incubation temperatures (p ≤ 0.05). Efforts were made to determine whether the rate of viral inactivation observed at the different incubation temperatures was related to characteristics inherent to the water that was collected from the different locations. The characteristics examined included physical and chemical parameters, indigenous bacterial counts, and the amount of bacterial growth that the waters would support (measured as the maximum number of generations which seeded bacteria could undergo after being placed into either pasteurized or sterile-filtered water samples). Analysis of viral inactivation rate versus these characteristics revealed three apparent effectors of viral persistence. These were (i) hardness and conductivity, both of which strongly correlated with one another; (ii) turbidity and suspended solids content, both of which strongly correlated with one another; and (iii) the number of generations of bacterial growth that a sample was capable of supporting, which also correlated with hardness and conductivity.Key words: virus, survival, inactivation rate, water.