Abstract
M. Tech.
Background: Waterborne disease contributes significantly to the total global disease burden. Populations in rural areas of South Africa depend on untreated waters for consumption and sanitation. Contamination of public water supplies by harmful bacteria such as pathogenic E. coli poses a major risk for public health. Ingestion of these pathogenic microorganisms present in the contaminated and untreated waters could cause infection, leading to systemic inflammatory responses manifested by the production of various proinflammatory cytokines. To date, there is no human system test available to detect whether water, following ingestion, would cause disease (i.e. whether the water is infectious). The current water testing methods only test for the presence of indicator organisms, such as faecal coliforms, total coliforms, and Escherichia coli. A reliable in-vitro bioassay that could assess whether the water would cause an inflammatory response was investigated in this study.
Objectives: Pro-inflammatory cytokines and whole-blood have been used in similar studies to detect the inflammatory responses following exposure to specific stimulants such as dust, lipopolysaccharide (LPS), E. coli and various others. It has been reported that larger numbers of these contaminants induced higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokine expression. This implies that the pro-inflammatory cytokine expression could be used as a marker of infection since, inflammation occurs in response to infection. Successful infection is thus necessary for inflammation to occur, and high levels of pro-inflammatory cytokine expression confirm that infection has occurred. Thus if pro-inflammatory cytokines could serve as indicators for infection, these cytokines could be used as indicators for bacterial pathogenicity of water.