Sewage as a carrier and disseminator of Poliomyelitis Virus

Abstract

Part I I. Studies on the Condiiions of Life of Poliomyelitis Virus outside the Human Organism.From the precediag it seems to be obvious that the presence of the poliomyelitis virus during an epidemic can without any great difficulty be demonstrated in sewagean observation which in our opinion indicates a massive, if also temporary, occurrence of this agent in the said medium. Our epidcmiological observation.s, made in connexion with the establishment of the virus content of Stockholm sewage in the autumn of 1939, gave US cause to assume that the virus, after leaving the human organism and passing into the sewage, afterwards in some way or other has un,dergone a multiplication. But this process of life can only be realised by the presence of an organism, in which this infectious agent, being of an ultra virus nature, finds good conditions for its growth. Where is one now to look for this vector, and of what kind is it? Does it live above the surface of the sewage or is it perhaps to he f0un.d within this vehicle itself?When Levaditi became acquainted with our fin.d of poliomyelitis virus in Stockholm sewage, and commented upon it in Academie de Medecine he put forward the suggestion that there must be LOC. citat.

Wastewater pandemic preparedness: Toward an end-to-end pathogen monitoring program

“…Years earlier, Paul and Trask reasoned that since the virus that causes polio could be found in fecal matter [first reported in 1912 (1)], it may also be shed into city wastewater (2). When macaques were injected with the sewage (there was no PCR at the time and microscopy was still developing) showed signs of poliomyelitis, a result confirmed by researchers in Stockholm (3), it suggested a human virus found in public excrement might report on the state of disease at the population level. However, it was a mentee of Paul, Dr. Joseph Melnick, who showed in the 1940s that polio levels in stool and sewage are associated with the number of severe cases in the population (a result that prompted him to search for viral prevalence based on fecal shedding rates), studies that birthed the field of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) (1,4,5).…”

Use of Cell Cultures to Study the Interactions of Ciliates with Fish

“…Perhaps, the first example of this was a study on Stockholm sewage for the possibility that ciliates harbored poliovirus [73]. Subsequently, laboratory investigations were done, commonly with Tetrahymena.…”

Nonbiting Flies and Disease

“…Poliomyelitis (14), and the finding of antibodies against mouse-adapted Lansing strain virus in animal sera (presumably indicating that infective animal feces sometimes were found) by Hammon (15) and Gordon (16), demonstrated the ready availability of virus to flies from commonly occurring sources during epidemics. These disclosures, occurring in the late 1930's and early 1940's, were followed by several studies on the natural occurrence and laboratory survival of poliomyelitis virus in several species of flies and, through 1945, are well summarized by Francis et al (17).…”