Cooling towers are a hotspot for evolving disease

Cooling towers are a hotspot for evolving disease
25 August 2006



Cooling towers could be evolutionary hotspots for new respiratory diseases.

Many species of bacteria, including those that cause legionnaires' disease, are thought to have evolved in association with an amoebic host. Now it seems that the warm, wet conditions found in cooling towers at factories and oil refineries make them a perfect spot for amoebas and bacteria to thrive, increasing the chances of new strains of pathogenic bacteria emerging.

Sharon Berk of Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville and her colleagues have found that amoebas in cooling towers are about 16 times as likely to host bacteria as those in ponds and lakes. "It's a problem that we have suspected, but now this confirms it," says Jeffrey Cirillo, a microbiologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Genetic tests identified several previously unknown strains of bacteria, including some that were similar to Legionella pneumophila, the cause of legionnaires' disease. Berk suggests that they might have been missed in the past because many of the bacteria could not be cultured outside of amoebas.>>>>snip

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125665.800-cooling-towers-are-a-hotspot-for-evolving-disease.html

because the Smirk has declared it.
In fact, they just took evolutionary biology off the list of approved college courses.

:sarcasm:

that they don't worry about any bacteria. Even if they do evolve, they get zapped with tritium spills - so no problem.

used in reactors. Your local grocery store, college, arena, probably uses cooling towers also. Proper maintenance and water treatment can prevent this bacteria.

...that has been a major concern in air conditioning units which integrate evaporative cooling stages. Finding a way to reject the heat without providing a moist breeding ground for microorganisms has been the inspiration for some of the advanced designs we may see in the future as the dessicant/adsorption/absorption technologies become more popular.

Interesting article.

but in Canada, the sump of a cooling tower or a fluid cooler is treated like a swimming pool. In addition to automatic circulation, chemical injection and filtration are used to prevent the sump turning into the sort of organic soup that caused the original Legionairre's disease bacterium to evolve.

It's not just the codes that require it - if the water wasn't treated the cooling tower would soon cease to function because of all the gunk.

nt