Microbial quality of meats marketed in the urban community of Antananarivo

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Environmental Factors and the Microbial Quality of Urban Drinking Water in a Low-Income Country: The Case of Madagascar

Access to piped water is often limited to urban areas in low-income countries, and the microbiological quality of drinking water varies due to technical and environmental constraints. To analyse the parameters that modulate the contamination of these systems, this study examines 16 years of microbial quality data for water supplied in 32 urban areas of Madagascar. A discriminant statistical approach and agglomerative hierarchical clusters were applied to environmental and climatic data. The microbial contamination varied between sites from 3.3 to 17.5%, and 78% of the supply systems showed large variations between years or months. Agglomerative hierarchical clusters (AHCs) revealed four supply system profiles that share a similar bacteriological evolution. Heavy rainfall and dry periods sustained increasing contamination, as reflected in levels of spores of sulphite-reducing clostridia (SSRC) and/or total coliforms (TC). SSRC were dominant in three profiles, with faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) dominant in the other. Principal component analysis demonstrated the main drivers of contamination: type of water source, implemented treatment, location of the site, population growth, lack of protection, agriculture, urbanization/sanitation, and flooding threats. Contamination increased over the 16-year period, reaching alarming levels. The protection of water sources should be a concern for public authorities

The impact of rainfall on drinking water quality in Antananarivo, Madagascar

Data Availability: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from JIRAMA (http://www.jirama.mg/). They are pubic third party data available through regular request to the office. Requests can be sent to: [email protected]. The person in charge of the data is the head of the data unit: [email protected] audienceLow-income cities that are subject to high population pressure and vulnerable to climate events often have a low capacity to continuously deliver safe drinking water. Here we reported the results of a 32-year survey on the temporal dynamics of drinking water quality indicators in the city of Antananarivo. We analyzed the long-term evolution of the quality of the water supplied and characterized the interactions between climatic conditions and the full-scale water supply system. A total of 25,467 water samples were collected every week at different points in the supplied drinking water system. Samples were analyzed for total coliforms (TC), Escherichia coli (EC), intestinal Enterococci (IE), and Spores of Sulphite-Reducing Clostridia (SSRC). Nine-hundred-eighty-one samples that were identified as positive for one or more indicators were unevenly distributed over time. The breakpoint method identified four periods when the time series displayed changes in the level and profile of contamination (i) and the monthly pattern of contamination (ii), with more direct effects of rainfall on the quality of supplied drinking water. The modeling showed significantly different lags among indicators of bacteria occurrence after cumulative rainfall, which range from 4 to 8 weeks. Among the effects of low-income urbanization, a rapid demographic transition and the degradation of urban watersheds have gradually affected the quality of the water supplied and resulted in the more direct effects of rainfall events. We focused on the need to adopt an alternative perspective of drinking water and urban watersheds management

Multicenter Study of Street Foods in 13 Towns on Four Continents by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Study Group of the International Network of Pasteur and Associated Institutes

Archives de Journal of Food Protection (https://jfoodprotection.org/toc/food/65/1)International audienceAn international multicenter study of ready-to-eat foods, sandwiches, and ice creams or sorbets sold in the streets and their vendors was carried out to assess the microbiological quality of these foods and to identify characteristics of the vendors possibly associated with pathogens. Thirteen towns in Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania were involved in the study. A single protocol was used in all 13 centers: representative sampling was by random selection of vendors and a sample of foods bought from each of these vendors at a time and date selected at random. Microbiological analyses were carried out using standardized Association Française de Normalisation methods, and the use of a standardized questionnaire to collect data concerning the characteristics of the vendors. Fifteen surveys were carried out, with 3,003 food samples from 1,268 vendors. The proportion of unsatisfactory food samples was between 12.7 and 82.9% for ice creams and sorbets and between 11.3 and 92% for sandwiches. For ice creams and sorbets, the sale of a large number of units (>80 per day) increased the risk of unsatisfactory food by a factor of 2.8 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.5 to 5.1), lack of training in food hygiene by 6.6 (95% CI: 1.1 to 50). and by a factor of 2.8 (95% CI: 1.4 to 5.4) for mobile vendors. These risk factors were not identified for sandwiches, this difference may be due to the presence of a cooking step in their preparation. These results show that the poor microbiological quality of these street foods constitutes a potential hazard to public health, that the extent of this hazard varies between the cities studied, and that vendors' health education in food safety is a crucial factor in the prevention of foodborne infections