Emergency call 24/7 for more inquiries

Please Call 050 3421 450

The 'exotic'viruses that live in your sewage

Sewage are serious health threats to humans and pets indoors.

Severity of the risk associated with indoors sewage contaminationis oftentimes underestimated by
uninformed homeowners. Threats to health and effects on weakenedimmune system associated with
sewage backflow and resulting from air-born and other pathogens.

 It's a  dirty job, but, in the name of science, someone has to do it. Sifting through  raw sewage may sound disgusting, but it's actually a "goldmine" for  scientists charged with discovering new viruses, as evidenced by a new study  published by the American Society for Microbiology. Here's what you should  know:

Scientists  really studied sewage? Yep. Only about 3,000 known viruses had actually been documented by  scientists — just "the tip of the iceberg," says the study's  editor, Michael Imperiale of the University of Michigan. To identify more,  researchers studied sewage from Pittsburgh, Barcelona, and Addis Ababa,  Ethiopa.

What did  they find?
An  incredible number of viruses: At least 43,381 so far. Don't freak out though.  There were plenty of known pathogens in the sewage — including  viruses that can cause cervical cancer and the stomach flu. And only a small  percentage of the sewage viruses were bugs that can cause human disease.  Indeed, 80 percent of the newly discovered unknown viruses are only interested  in bacteria, and of the remaining 20 percent that attack multi-celled  organisms, 9 in 10 infect only plants. "That's because humans eat plants  and plant viruses dominate the types found in human excrement," says  Richard Knox of NPR.

In that  case, what's the value of these discoveries?
"New"  human diseases can be caused by previously unknown viruses. Witness the HIV  (human immunodeficiency virus) epidemic, or the SARS phenomenon.  "Knowing more about what viruses lurk in the environment, even if they  don't yet cause human diseases, can be a very good thing in the surveillance  of new public health threats," says Knox.

What now?
The big takeaway, is that we're only aware of "a tiny fraction"  of the viruses that actually exist in the world. And it turns out there's  "a virus-rich universe, ripe for exploration, waiting just at the end of  the plumbing."

Sources: U.S. News,  NPR, Scientific American

posted on October 6, 2011, at 12:50 PM

Call  JB Allo Sanitary Services for Sewage AMC Clean up

JB Allo introducing it's newest Portable Rigid Machine for unblocking services in Hotels and Restaurants that our High Pressure Van cannot reach. This is the latest innovation that can solve all your blockages located in unreachable places like Towers, Buildings, Hotels and Restaurants and Mall.