Microbiologist Works to Better China's Water Quality

When an earthquake registering a 7.9 on the Richter scale struck China’s Sichuan province last May, water-quality experts feared the worst. Had water lines mixed with sewer lines? Would a disease outbreak occur if the thousands without electricity or supplies drank the water? A Virginia Tech researcher was working in China during the disaster and helped to answer these questions.

“As soon as Chinese officials could get air transport into the damaged area and begin evacuations, they started bringing out water samples and flying those back to the Center for Disease Control in Nanjing,” says Charles Hagedorn, professor of crop and soil environmental sciences.

Hagedorn and others at the Nanjing lab analyzed the water samples and reported to officials at ground zero that the water was safe to drink. “I wound up doing more basic, applied bacteriology in a four- or five-day period than I had done in the last 20 years, but at last all this expertise and experience came into play when it really counted for something,” he says.

Although Chinese officials were able to declare that there was no risk of a water-borne disease outbreak, Hagedorn had to delay his research on the Yangtze River – the third-longest stretch of water in the world after the Amazon and the Nile – for several months. Upon China’s invitation, American scientists are studying the best ways to remove contaminants that cause seasonal outbreaks of cholera, typhoid fever, polio, and other diseases spread through polluted water.

“The Chinese are already at the cutting edge in microbiology,” Hagedorn says. “I can help them get started, but the technical expertise they need is just a lack of experience. They are behind the United States in water quality by about 30 years, but it won’t take them 30 years to catch up.”

Research teams in China are using microbial source tracking, which tries to determine whether bacteria in the water came from human, agricultural, or other wastes, on a limited basis. Though popular in the United States, this technology is not the best approach in China, according to many microbiologists.

“In the United States, we use indicator bacteria to monitor water quality, but in China where pollution is so massive, you can use epidemiology to trace the pathogens themselves,” Hagedorn says. “We are tracking the sources of actual disease outbreaks in the water.”

Despite numerous challenges, Hagedorn believes China’s practice of placing water lines and other utility lines in separate trenches not only lends itself to improved water quality, but also prevented gross water contamination during the earthquake last spring.

In addition to working on the logistics so that Virginia Tech can continue to help China with water quality in the Yangtze River for years to come, Hagedorn and his wife Susan, a scientific and technical writing instructor in the English Department, are developing workshops to help graduate students in China publish their research in English-language scientific journals.

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charles hagedorn

After seeing the water quality issues along the Yangtze River first hand, Charles Hagedorn (pictured here) and other researchers decided to move their efforts away from microbial source tracking and focus on locating the source of water-borne disease outbreaks.

A researcher with the Chinese Center for Disease Control shows a water sample at a laboratory in Nanjing.

University podcast (Length 10:00 | 9.2 MB) - working to better China's water quality