Food and Environmental Virology

In the field of chemical engineering and water treatment, the study of viruses, included surrogates, is well documented. Often, surrogates are used to study viruses and their behavior because they can be produced in larger quantities in safer conditions and are easier to handle. In fact, surrogates allow studying microorganisms which are non-infectious to humans but share some properties similar to pathogenic viruses: structure, composition, morphology, and size. Human noroviruses, recognized as the leading cause of epidemics and sporadic cases of gastroenteritis across all age groups, may be mimicked by the Tulane virus...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) and clinical surveillance have been used as tools for analyzing the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in the community, but both approaches can be strongly influenced by some sources of variability. From the challenging perspective of integrating environmental and clinical data, we performed a correlation analysis between SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in raw sewage and incident COVID-19 cases in areas served by medium-size wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) from 2021 to 2023...

Norovirus is the predominant cause of viral acute gastroenteritis globally. While person-to-person is the most reported transmission route, norovirus is also associated with waterborne and foodborne illness, including from the consumption of contaminated bivalve molluscan shellfish. The main cause of shellfish contamination is via the bioaccumulation of norovirus from growing waters impacted by human wastewater. However, data on the persistence of infectious norovirus in the environment are limited due to a lack of a human norovirus culture method in the past...

Fecal shedding of SARS-CoV-2 leads to a renaissance of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) as additional tool to follow epidemiological trends in the catchment of treatment plants. As alternative to the most commonly used composite samples in surveillance programs, passive sampling is increasingly studied. However, the many sorbent materials in different reports hamper the comparison of results and a standardization of the approach is necessary. Here, we compared different cost-effective sorption materials (cheesecloths, gauze swabs, electronegative filters, glass wool, and tampons) in torpedo-style housings with composite samples...

Human enteric viruses are important etiological agents of waterborne diseases. Environmental waters are usually contaminated with low virus concentration requiring large concentration factors for effective detection by (RT)-qPCR. Low-pressure reverse osmosis is often used to remove water contaminants, but very few studies focused on the effective virus removal of reverse osmosis treatment with feed concentrations as close as possible to environmental concentrations and principally relied on theoretical virus removal...

Viral diseases are a severe public health issue worldwide. During the coronavirus pandemic, the use of alcohol-based sanitizers was recommended by WHO. Enveloped viruses are sensitive to ethanol, whereas non-enveloped viruses are considerably less sensitive. However, no quantitative analysis has been conducted to determine virus ethanol sensitivity and the important variables influencing the inactivation of viruses to ethanol. This study aimed to determine viruses' sensitivity to ethanol and the most important variables influencing the inactivation of viruses exposed to ethanol based on machine learning...

Norovirus is one of the largest causes of gastroenteritis worldwide, and Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an emerging pathogen that has become the most dominant cause of acute viral hepatitis in recent years. The presence of norovirus and HEV has been reported within wastewater in many countries previously. Here we used amplicon deep sequencing (metabarcoding) to identify norovirus and HEV strains in wastewater samples from England collected in 2019 and 2020. For HEV, we sequenced a fragment of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) gene targeting genotype three strains...

Plant extracts, natural products and plant oils contain natural virucidal actives that can be used to replace active ingredients in commercial sanitizers and disinfectants. This review focuses on the virucidal mechanisms of natural substances that may exhibit potential for indoor air and fomite disinfection. Review of scientific studies indicates: (1) most natural product studies use crude extracts and do not isolate or identify exact active antiviral substances; (2) many natural product studies contain unclear explanations of virucidal mechanisms of action; (3) natural product evaluations of virucidal activity should include methods that validate efficacy under standardized disinfectant testing procedures (e...

Growing evidence shed light on the importance of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) during the pandemic, when the patients rarely visited the clinics despite the fact that the infections were still prevalent in the community as before. The abundance of infections in the community poses a constant threat of the emergence of new epidemic strains. Herein, we investigated enteric viruses in raw sewage water (SW) from Japan's Tohoku region and compared them to those from the Kansai region to better understand the circulating strains and their distribution across communities during the COVID-19 pandemic...

Group A Rotavirus, Human Astrovirus, and Norovirus (RVA, HAstV, and NoV) are recognized as the major causative agents of acute gastroenteritis in children and adults worldwide. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and molecular epidemiology of RVA, HAstV, and NoV in wastewater from three cities in Uruguay. Thirty-six samples from Bella Unión, Salto, and Fray Bentos cities were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative PCR. RVA was the most frequently detected virus (50%), followed by HAstV (39%), NoV GII (36%), and NoV GI (25%)...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater monitoring has been used to monitor the levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA entering the sewerage system. In Italy, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità coordinated the SARI project (Sorveglianza Ambientale Reflue in Italia) to detect SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. In this study, the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants in raw wastewater against COVID-19 cases was evaluated together with the effect of temperature and precipitation on virus spread. We validated a predictive model, proposed by De Giglio et al...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is the leading cause of acute viral hepatitis globally, with zoonotic potential, and pigs are considered the major reservoir. To determine the seroprevalence of HEV infection in pigs reared in backyard conditions in the northeastern region of India, blood samples were collected from 400 pigs from five northeastern states (80 samples from each state) and tested for IgG antibodies against HEV using an ELISA assay. Questionnaires on farm characteristics and management practices were completed, and risk factors associated with HEV were studied using univariate and multivariate analysis...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) represents an important public health concern in many developing countries, including Africa. Transmission of HEV to humans by contaminated drinking water is the most important mode of transmission in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to assess the presence of HEV in the environment in Cameroon through molecular analysis of sewage samples. Retrospectively, a total of 157 sewage samples collected between January 2018 and December 2019 were randomly selected and analyzed by molecular techniques to detect and characterize the HEV followed by sequencing and phylogenetic analysis...

One of the most frequent causes of acute viral hepatitis is hepatitis E virus (HEV) causing 20 million infections worldwide each year and 44,000 deaths. Studies on HEV in the Iberian Peninsula have been increasing through time with HEV infection being identified in humans and animals. The aim of the present systematic review was to compile and evaluate all the published data on HEV from studies performed in humans, animals and environmental samples in the Iberian Peninsula. The electronic databases Mendeley, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were thoroughly searched, and research published up until February 01, 2023 were included...

Hepatitis E caused by hepatitis E virus (HEV) is considered an emerging foodborne zoonosis in industrialized, non-endemic countries. Domestic pigs and wild boars are considered the main reservoir of HEV. However, HEV can also infect an ever-expanding host range of animals, but they exact role in transmitting the virus to other species or humans is mostly unknown. In this work, we investigated the spread of HEV in free-living and captive spotted deer (Axis axis) from Uruguay in a 2-year period (2020-2022) and examined the role of this invasive species as a new potential reservoir of the virus...

Soft fruits are at particular risk of contamination with enteric viruses such as Hepatitis A virus (HAV), Hepatitis E Virus (HEV), Norovirus (NoV), Human Adenovirus (HAdV) and Sapovirus (SaV). The aim of this study was to investigate, for the first time, the presence of these biological agents in ready to eat (RTE) berries at point of retail in Ireland. A sampling strategy was designed in which RTE fresh and frozen strawberries and raspberries were purchased from five retailers between May and October 2018...

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is present in both respiratory secretions and feces, creating its potential for transmission by swimming pools. Recreational water activity is known to be at increased risk of respiratory infections and respiratory viruses have caused been detected and have caused outbreaks in swimming pools. However, little is known regarding the chlorine inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 in water typical of swimming pools in the USA. In this study, the inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 Isolate hCoV-19/USA-WA1/2020 was observed in water by chlorination...

Enterobacter cloacae is a widespread opportunistic pathogen that causes urinary tract infection. The abuse of antibiotics enabled multidrug-resistant strains to spread. Bacteriophage therapy is a naturally, safe, and efficient alternative treatment technology against multi-resistant bacteria. In this study, a virulent phage vB_EclM_Q7622 (Q7622) was isolated from the sewage of Jiangcun poultry market in Guangzhou city. Transmission electron microscopy indicated that Q7622 had an icosahedral head (97.8 ± 5...

Respiratory diseases are significant recurrent threats to global public health. Since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, seasonal influenza viruses continue to cause epidemics around the world each year. More recently, the COVID-19 global pandemic conducted a public health crisis with more than 6 million deaths and it also severely affected the global economy. Due to the phenomenon that people get infection from objects carrying viruses, it has aroused people's attention to home disinfection. As there is no ideal existing common domestic disinfectant, new and safer antiviral disinfectants are urgently needed...

Monitoring the circulation of enteric viruses in environmental wastewater is a valuable tool for preventing the emergence of waterborne and food-borne diseases in humans. The detection of viruses was performed in five Tunisian wastewater treatment plants, three located in the Grand Tunis City (WWTP 1, WWTP 2, WWTP 3) and two in the Sahel of Tunisia (WWTP 4, WWTP 4), known as very developed and crowded zones, to assess the effectiveness of three biological wastewater treatment procedures namely natural oxidizing lagoons, rotating biodisks procedure, activated sludge procedure, and one tertiary sewage treatment using UV-C254 reactor for this enteric viruses' removal...