Fate of<i>Clostridium difficile</i>during wastewater treatment and incidence in Southern Ontario watersheds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: To investigate the prevalence of Clostridium difficile encountered during sewage treatment and in water sources into which treated effluent was directly or indirectly discharged. METHODS AND RESULTS: Samples from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and rivers were collected and then enriched for Cl. difficile. Each of the isolates was subjected to toxinotyping and DNA typing using ribotyping, in addition to pulse-field gel electrophoresis. Cl. difficile was isolated from 92% (108/117) of the raw sludge and 96% (106/110) of the anaerobic digested sludge samples from two Ontario WWTPs. The pathogen was recovered from 73% (43/59) of dewatered biosolids and effluent discharge, in addition to river sediments 39% (25/64). Ribotype 078 (commonly associated with Community Acquired infections) was recovered from raw sewage (19%; 21/108), digested sludge (8%; 8/106), biosolids (35%; 15/43) and river sediments (60%; 15/25). CONCLUSIONS: Clostridium difficile is commonly encountered in raw sewage and survives the wastewater treatment process. The pathogen can then be disseminated into the wider environment via effluent and land application of biosolids. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACT OF THE STUDY: The study has illustrated the wide distribution of toxigenic Cl. difficile in WWTPs and river sediments although the clinical significance still requires to be elucidated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".