Escherichia coli contamination and health aspects of soil and tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum L.) subsurface drip irrigated with on-site treated domestic wastewater.

Faecal contamination of soil and tomatoes irrigated by sprinkler as well as surface and subsurface drip irrigation with treated domestic wastewater were compared in 2007 and 2008 at experimental sites in Crete and Italy. Wastewater was treated by Membrane Bio Reactor (MBR) technology, gravel filtration or UV-treatment before used for irrigation. Irrigation water, soil and tomato samples were collected during two cropping seasons and enumerated for the faecal indicator bacterium Escherichia coli and helminth eggs. The study found elevated levels of E. coli in irrigation water (mean: Italy 1753 cell forming unit (cfu) per 100 ml and Crete 488 cfu per 100 ml) and low concentrations of E. coli in soil (mean: Italy 95 cfu g(-1) and Crete 33 cfu g(-1)). Only two out of 84 tomato samples in Crete contained E. coli (mean: 2700 cfu g(-1)) while tomatoes from Italy were free of E. coli. No helminth eggs were found in the irrigation water or on the tomatoes from Crete. Two tomato samples out of 36 from Italy were contaminated by helminth eggs (mean: 0.18 eggs g(-1)) and had been irrigated with treated wastewater and tap water, respectively. Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis DNA fingerprints of E. coli collected during 2008 showed no identical pattern between water and soil isolates which indicates contribution from other environmental sources with E. coli, e.g. wildlife. A quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) model with Monte Carlo simulations adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) found the use of tap water and treated wastewater to be associated with risks that exceed permissible limits as proposed by the WHO (1.0 × 10(-3) disease risk per person per year) for the accidental ingestion of irrigated soil by farmers (Crete: 0.67 pppy and Italy: 1.0 pppy). The QMRA found that the consumption of tomatoes in Italy was deemed to be safe while permissible limits were exceeded in Crete (1.0 pppy). Overall the quality of tomatoes was safe for human consumption since the disease risk found on Crete was based on only two contaminated tomato samples. It is a fundamental limitation of the WHO QMRA model that it is not based on actual pathogen numbers, but rather on numbers of E. coli converted to estimated pathogen numbers, since it is widely accepted that there is poor correlation between E. coli and viral and parasite pathogens. Our findings also stress the importance of the external environment, typically wildlife, as sources of faecal contamination

Dirac spectrum representation of Polyakov loop fluctuations in lattice QCD

Dirac spectrum representations of the Polyakov loop fluctuations are derived on the temporally odd-number lattice, where the temporal length is odd with the periodic boundary condition. We investigate the Polyakov loop fluctuations based on these analytical relations. It is semianalytically and numerically found that the low-lying Dirac eigenmodes have little contribution to the Polyakov loop fluctuations, which are sensitive probe for the quark deconfinement. Our results suggest no direct one-to-one corresponding between quark confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in QCD.Comment: 7 pages and 1 figure. Proceeding of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2015), 14-18 July 2015, Kobe International Conference Center, Kobe, Japan. Also regarded as the Proceeding of the 4th International Conference on new Frontiers in Physics (ICNFP 2015), 23-30 August 2015, Conference Center of the Orthodox Academy of Crete, Crete, Greec

Venice in the East: Renaissance Crete and Cyprus

This music bears witness to how ancient Greek and Latin liturgical traditions were richly embellished during the Renaissance on the islands of Crete and Cyprus, all within the shared cultural space of Venetian rule. First performed by Cappella Romana at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht (Netherlands)

Increasing incidence of zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis on Crete, Greece

To determine whether the incidence of canine leishmaniasis has increased on Crete, Greece, we fitted infection models to serodiagnostic records of 8,848 dog samples for 1990–2006. Models predicted that seroprevalence has increased 2.4% (95% confidence interval 1.61%–3.51%) per year and that incidence has increased 2.2- to 3.8-fold over this 17-year period

DIANA, a program for Feynman Diagram Evaluation

A C-program DIANA (DIagram ANAlyser) for the automatic Feynman diagram evaluation is presented.Comment: LaTeX, 5 pages, no figures; talk given at 6th International Workshop on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms, Symbolic Algebra, Automatic Calculation (AIHENP 99), Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 12-16 April, 199

Characterisation of small ruminant production in Crete

Subproject 2 of the LowInputBreeds project aims to improve performance, animal health & welfare, and product quality in organic and low input breed sheep production systems. One focus is breeding under Mediterranean condition