UK Focus vii


New £13 million Centre of Excellence in water-based health monitoring to be established at the University of Bath


The Centre of Excellence in Water-Based Early-Warning Systems for Health Protection, WBE@Bath, will develop a public health surveillance system to detect outbreaks of diseases by testing water systems for traces of pathogens or other biomarkers at a community level.


This could help prevent future pandemics from spreading by detecting them early, and will provide better understanding of chronic, non-communicable diseases such as diabetes.


An £8.4 million investment in the Centre was announced this week by Research England, part of UK Research and Innovation. The full cost of the project will total £13 million including contributions from the University of Bath and partners.


Cutting-edge facilities will build talent pool


As well as an ‘Urban Living Lab’, the Centre will host state-of-the-art analytical capabilities including a digital water-sensing platform, training base and testing infrastructure designed to provide low-cost and real-time community-wide profi ling of population health and the environment.


Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern will lead the new WBE@Bath Centre of Excellence


Five prize fellow positions and a doctoral training partnership will also be created through the project, increasing the skills and expertise base while diversifying talent.


Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern, a co-director of Bath’s Water Innovation Research Centre and a member of the University’s Institute for Sustainability, will lead the Centre. She says: “We’re delighted to have received this funding to expand the work of WBE@Bath, as well as our capability to train and bring new talent into the sector.


“COVID-19 demonstrated how the successful management of disease outbreaks is critically dependent on real-time, cost-effective and comprehensive surveillance systems enabling testing of whole communities, irrespective of location.


“Our previous research has shown the transformative potential of using wastewater-based epidemiology to carry out this testing in locations such as water recycling centres. These techniques could give us a crucial tool in detecting future epidemics before they happen.


“We will build a unique, full scale urban living lab that will enable testing of new approaches and tools aimed at better understanding of how diseases spread, the risk of exposure to hazardous chemicals and how to develop more effective interventions and management strategies.”


Centre to be designed with partners The Centre will be designed with input from Bath’s longstanding partners including Wessex Water, the UK Health Security Agency, Arup, the Environment Agency, The London Data Company, AWS, Waters and The Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Trust and Bath & North-East Somerset Council. The project’s partner universities are Newcastle, Cardiff, Exeter, Glasgow, Stellenbosch (South Africa) and Lagos (Nigeria), and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.


The funding is part of a £156 million investment by Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England (E3) Fund, which will support 18 universities across England to expand their small, but outstanding research units.


Dr Steven Hill, Director of Research at Research England, says: “Our investment will also help to reinforce the contribution of HEPs to their region through strategic local partnerships, focusing on sharing resources and infrastructure and generating local impact, backed by robust institutional leadership.


“We’re excited to see how these units develop over the next fi ve years.” For More Info, email:


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ASTM D8192: Automated Water Hardness Determination


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Water hardness is one of the most popular analyses when it comes to water quality determination, being important for both human health and industrial productivity. Until now, various national and international norms described the analysis of water hardness by manual titration with visual endpoint determination. This subjective technique is prone to human errors


and can lead to less accurate and reproducible results. The new norm ASTM D8192 presents how water hardness (total, calcium, and magnesium hardness) can be determined by photometric titration with an optical sensor for objective endpoint determination.


Read the new white paper from Metrohm: ASTM D8192: Automated water hardness determination


More information online: ilmt.co/PL/X1j3 For More Info, email:


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The fastest and most eff ective way to fi ght bacteria and material damage


Microbes have favourable conditions in which they thrive. Unfortunately, these conditions are ideal in industrial processes where water is involved in any form. This is particularly the case in evaporative cooling water systems where microbes are abundant due to the concentration of nutrients through the system ‘cycling’, but also in further industrial water applications. The easiest and quickest way to get certainty about unwanted microbiological inhabitants is Lovibond’s dipslides. They indicate the presence of microbes with semi-quantitative methods and thus enable prevention right in time.


But why are bacteria and microbiological infestations so dangerous for industrial systems? Due to the constantly wet surfaces, the abundant growth of microbes leads to the formation of biofi lm. These biofi lms, if left untreated can result in biofouling, resulting in reduced plant effi cacy and potentially reducing plant life.


The microorganisms are generally common soil, aquatic, and airborne microbes that enter the system either via make-up water, process leaks, or are scrubbed from the air and they vary depending on the source of water. That can be bacteria in a large variety. Spherical, rod- shaped, spiral, and fi lamentous forms are some of the more common species. Other sorts of microorganisms are fungi, often moulds and yeasts. They can also produce slime. Blue–green algae are now classifi ed with bacteria - Cyanobacteria. Green growths however are still responsible for blockage of screens and distribution decks.


All of them need to be controlled, but their control depends on whether they are in a planktonic (free-fl oating) or sessile (attached) form. The sessile form is responsible for biofi lm formation. The microorganisms that form them secrete polysaccharides when submerged allowing them to form a gel-like network which prevents them from being removed by the normal fl ow of water and hinders the action of a biocide, either oxidising or non-oxidising type. This is the reason the control of biofi lms can require biocidal dosages many times higher than the control of planktonic species.


Once fouling has occurred in a system even mechanical cleaning cannot remove all traces of the biofi lm. Surfaces that have previously been fouled are more susceptible to colonisation than new surfaces as residual biofi lm materials promote growth and reduce lag time between fouling and reappearing. Biofi lms also cause the insulation effect where the performance of the heat exchanger deteriorates in correlation to the thickness of the biofi lm. They also cause corrosion known as Microbial Infl uenced Corrosion (MIC): whereby, the microbes act as catalysts; microbes also prevent corrosion inhibitors from reaching and passivating the metal surfaces and corrosion reactions are accelerated by microbiological interactions. In addition: Microbial by products can be directly damaging to the metal.


It has therefore been “Best Practice” to use indicator organisms to gain a general overview of the overall microbiological condition of the water. Traditional methods have adopted standard agar plate count methods. They require to fulfi l regulatory guidance, however, as the plate count method requires a laboratory, fi ltration set up, and training in how to count the results. The simpler method for monitoring is agar dipslides. They form part of many legislative guidance papers in terms of routing microbiological monitoring. They are relatively inexpensive, easy to use, and are available in multiple formats to optimise growth conditions and types of microbe. Lovibond® dipslides for every situation, with large surfaces of 11.5 cm2


offers a wide range of for high sensitivity and an effective contact area of 10 cm² for easy calculation


during surface testing; the media is produced in accordance with ISO 11133 and the dipslides are capable of monitoring microbial growth with a potential of more than 100 (102) organisms in one millilitre of sample liquid.


More information online: ilmt.co/PL/8NwN For More Info, email:


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