Mediterranean-African countries (MACs) face a major water crisis. The annual renewable water resources are close to the 500 m /capita threshold of absolute water scarcity, and water withdrawals exceed total renewable water resources by 30%. Such a low water availability curbs economic development in agriculture, which accounts for 86% of freshwater consumption. The analysis of the current situation of wastewater treatment, irrigation, and water management in MACs and of the research projects targeted to these countries indicates the need for 1) an enhanced capacity to analyze water stress, 2) the development of water management strategies capable of including wastewater reuse, and 3) development of locally adapted water treatment and irrigation technologies. This analysis shaped the MADFORWATER project (www.madforwater.eu), whose goal is to develop a set of integrated technological and management solutions to enhance wastewater treatment, wastewater reuse for irrigation, and water efficiency in agriculture in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. MADFORWATER develops and adapts technologies for the production of irrigation-quality water from drainage canals and municipal, agro-industrial, and industrial wastewaters and technologies for water efficiency and reuse in agriculture, initially validated at laboratory scale, to 3 hydrological basins in the selected MACs. Selected technologies will be further adapted and validated in 4 demonstration plants of integrated wastewater treatment and reuse. Integrated strategies for wastewater treatment and reuse targeted to the selected basins are developed, and guidelines for the development of integrated water management strategies in other basins of the 3 target MACs will be produced. The social and technical suitability of the developed technologies and nontechnological tools in relation to the local context is evaluated with the participation of MAC stakeholders and partners. Guidelines on economic instruments and policies for the effective implementation of the proposed water management solutions in the target MACs will be developed. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:447-462. © 2018 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).

Recombination between two strains is a known phenomenon for enteroviruses replicating within a single cell. We describe a recombinant strain recovered from human stools, typed as coxsackievirus B4 (CV-B4) and CV-B3 after partial sequencing of the VP1 and VP2 coding regions, respectively. The strain was neutralized by a polyclonal CV-B3-specific antiserum but not by a CV-B4-specific antiserum. The nucleotide sequence analysis of the whole structural genomic region showed the occurrence of a recombination event at position 1950 within the VP3 capsid gene, in a region coding for the 2b antigenic site previously described for CV-B3. This observation evidences for the first time the occurrence of an interserotypic recombination within the VP2-VP3-VP1 capsid region between two nonpoliovirus enterovirus strains. The neutralization pattern suggests that the major antigenic site is located within the VP2 protein.Enteroviruses are small, nonenveloped, positive singlestranded RNA viruses belonging to the family Picornaviridae. Human enteroviruses (HEV) comprise 68 serotypes, subdivided into five species on the basis of genetic properties: HEV-A to HEV-D and poliovirus (PV) (38). These viruses are responsible for a wide range of acute and chronic clinical manifestations (32).The RNA genome, 7.5 kb long, is constituted by a single open reading frame flanked by 5Ј and 3Ј untranslated regions. The coding region is translated into a single polyprotein of 2,200 amino acids and is then processed to generate four structural proteins (VP1 to VP4) and seven nonstructural proteins (2A to 2C and 3A to 3D). The four structural proteins constitute the icosahedral capsid that contains the major antigenic determinants (22) and the principal attachment sites to the cellular receptors (for a review, see reference 10).Recombination between two strains is a known phenomenon for enteroviruses replicating within a single cell. Although recombination has long been recognized as an important property of PV (9, 17), several recent publications have demonstrated that it is also extremely frequent in non-PV enteroviruses (2, 6-8, 15, 17-20, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35). Despite this high level of genetic instability, the occurrence of intra-and interserotypic recombination events in the VP2-VP3-VP1 structural coding region has been shown to be a rare phenomenon and up to now restricted to PV strains (5,14,21,40). Structural requirements of the virion shell or of receptor binding were thought to be involved in the restriction of recombination within this region (17,30,36).In this paper, we describe an interserotypic recombination event occurring in the VP3 coding region of a clinical strain of HEV-B and leading to a chimeric coxsackievirus B3 (CV-B3)/ CV-B4 type. MATERIALS AND METHODSVirus isolation and identification. The analyzed virus strain (SE-03-78616) was isolated from the KB cell line in 2003 from stools of a patient admitted for meningitis in the pediatric unit of Toulon Hospital (France). The strain was purified by the limiting dilution method in ce...

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