Hospital Wastewater Sludge: An Unaddressed Environmental Reservoir for Emerging and Rare Nosocomial Pathogens

Nosocomial infections cause significant mortality and financial losses each year. Most of these infections are caused by multidrug resistant (MDR) opportunistic pathogens and therefore are difficult to treat by standard therapies. Though hospitals are considered as ecological niches for nosocomial pathogens, environmental reservoirs for the same are still underexplored. The present study addressed this issue by systematically profiling the pathogenic diversity of hospital wastewater sludge hypothesized as an important reservoir for nosocomial pathogens within a hospital setting using Illumina Miseq Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) approach. The NGS data showed that i) nosocomial pathogens dominated the hospital sludge bacterial profile and majority of them fell in the category of either emerging or rare pathogens ii) Majority of the pathogens formed part of the low abundant microbiota represented by 3.56% of the reads iii) Nearly 14% of the reads were represented by the unculturable bacteria iv) Of the 580 species-level operational taxonomic units (OTUs) identified in this study, 166 matched with potential human pathogens v) Enterobacter cloacae (56.45%) was the most dominant species followed by  Pseudomonas putida (6.07%), Fusobacterium ulcerans (3.08%) Acidaminococcus fermentans (2.03%) respectively. Aeromonas hydrophila, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pantoea agglomerans formed the less dominant species. This study points towards the catastrophic effect on public health and environment that may result from the co-treatment of hospital wastewater with domestic wastewater in municipal wastewater treatment plants and the use of resultant sludge in agriculture which is a common method of sludge disposal practiced in developing countries. Keywords: Hospital sludge, Next Generation Sequencing, Nosocomial Pathogens, Emerging Pathogens, Rare Pathogens &nbsp

Loss of CCR7 Expression on CD56brightCD56^{bright} NK Cells Is Associated with a CD56dimCD16+CD56^{dim}CD16^{+} NK Cell-Like Phenotype and Correlates with HIV Viral Load

NK cells are pivotal sentinels of the innate immune system and distinct subpopulations in peripheral blood have been described. A number of studies addressed HIV-induced alterations of NK cell phenotype and functionality mainly focusing on $CD56^{dim}CD16^{+}$ and $CD56^{-} CD16^{+}$ NK cells. However, the impact of HIV-infection on $CD56^{bright}$ NK cells is less well understood. Here we report a rise of $CD56^{bright}$ NK cells in HIV-infected individuals, which lack CCR7-expression and strongly correlate with HIV viral load. $CCR7^{−} CD56^{bright}$ NK cells were characterized by increased cytolytic potential, higher activation states and a more differentiated phenotype. These cells thus acquired a number of features of $CD56^{dim}CD16^{+}$ NK cells. Furthermore, $CD56^{bright}$ NK cells from HIV patients exhibited higher degranulation levels compared to uninfected individuals. Thus, chronic HIV-infection is associated with a phenotypic and functional shift of $CD56^{bright}$ NK cells, which provides a novel aspect of HIV-associated pathogenesis within the NK cell compartment

Is dairy wastewater safe for production of edible microbial biomass: A case study of Saras dairy plant at Jaipur, India

Mismanagement of wastewater at large scale may lead to catastrophic environmental and health consequences. Microbial remediation of wastewater is one of the most effective low-cost solutions. There are also initiatives to use wastewater for production edible biomass as an alternative for protein diets. While much researches were oriented towards maximum recovery of biomass and applications, less were focused on mutagenicity of dairy wastewater. In this study, we examined wastewater of one of the largest dairy industries in Rajasthan for its suitability for microbial biomass production and mutagenicity. Influent wastewater was collected from Saras dairy plant, Jaipur, for over a week. Physiochemical properties of wastewater were examined, such as; temperature, pH, salinity, TSS, TDS, turbidity, conductivity, BOD, COD, total carbon, and total nitrogen. SOS chromotest and Salmonella fluctuation test (TA 98, TA 100 and TA 102) were carried out at variable concentration of wastewater to assess mutagenic activity. Results indicated ideal pH, temperature and salinity, for microbial remediation. High TOC and TKN were also observed in the investigated wastewater, which is few of the prerequisites for single cell production. The ratio of BOD and COD was between 0.3-0.4, making the wastewater ideal for microbial growth. No mutagenic activity was observed by SOS chromotest, all three concentrations (C 0.01, C 0.1, and C 0.2) investigated in this study were <1.5 IF. Likewise, mutagenic ratio for all three types of Salmonella revertants were below 1.2 threshold, for investigated concentrations (C 0.5, C 1, and C 10) of wastewater. Conclusively, examined influent wastewater is less likely to induce mutagenic activity at the investigated concentration. Through physiochemical analysis, the investigated wastewater assumed to be candidate substrate for microbial biomass production

Assessing the Impact of E-government: A Study of Projects in India

In recent years, there has been extensive investment in e-government throughout the developing world. Still, little is known about the impact of those investments, partly due to a lack of assessment guidance. This paper reports development of an assessment methodology that could be used in developing countries to justify investments in e-government, as well as to establish a performance benchmark for future projects. This framework identifies key stakeholders, dimensions on which the impact needs to be measured, and a methodology of measurement. Client value is measured primarily in two dimensions: 1) cost to the client of accessing services, and 2) perception by the client of quality of service and governance. In a limited way, the financial cost-benefit impact to the agency implementing the project is also studied. The paper takes India as its example location for application of the framework, presenting assessment results from eight e-government projects which estimate the difference between client ratings of computerized and (earlier) manual systems. Clients indicated an overwhelming preference for computerized service delivery, with reports of fewer journeys, less waiting time, and some reduction in corruption (marginal in places). The results provided a tentative affirmation of the improvements that may be possible through the use of ICTs in delivering government services in developing countries. Overall impact showed wide variation across projects, highlighting the need to pay greater attention to process reform in the design of e-government projects. Measurement of direct monetary benefits to the clients provides a basis for determining the service fees that could be charged. An assessment of incremental costs of processing a transaction can help evaluate the feasibility of a public-private partnership model. The Government of India has adopted the framework used in this study to assess the impact of all mature projects implemented at the national, state, and local levels

Mining Personally Important Places from GPS Tracks

The discovery of a person’s personally important places involves obtaining the physical locations for a person’s places that matter to his daily life and routines. This problem is driven by the requirements from emerging location-aware applications, which allow a user to pose queries and obtain information in reference to places, e.g., “home”, “work ” or “Northwest Health Club”. It is a challenge to map from physical locations to personally meaningful places because GPS tracks are continuous data both spatially and temporally, while most existing data mining techniques expect discrete data. Previous work has explored algorithms to discover personal places from location data. However, they all have limitations. Our work proposes a two-step approach that discretized continuous GPS data into places and learns important places from the place features. Our approach was validated using real user data and shown to have good accuracy when applied in predicting not only important and frequent places, but also important and not so frequent places.

HIV Infection Is Associated with a Preferential Decline in Less-Differentiated CD56dim CD16+ NK Cells▿

HIV-1 infection is characterized by loss of CD56dim CD16+ NK cells and increased terminal differentiation on various lymphocyte subsets. We identified a decrease of CD57− and CD57dim cells but not of CD57bright cells on CD56dim CD16+ NK cells in chronic HIV infection. Increasing CD57 expression was strongly associated with increasing frequencies of killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) and granzyme B-expressing cells but decreasing percentages of cells expressing CD27+, HLA-DR+, Ki-67+, and CD107a. Our data indicate that HIV leads to a decline of less-differentiated cells and suggest that CD57 is a useful marker for terminal differentiation on NK cells