Recovery of Cryptosporidium and Giardia organisms from surface water by counter-flow refining microfiltration

As waterborne parasitic cryptosporidiosis and giardiasis outbreaks continue globally, monitoring of Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia in surface water continues to be challenging. Lack of non-clogging and high-efficiency methods for recovery of C. parvum oocysts and G. lamblia cysts in environmental water strongly limits the sensitivity of detection methods for these protozoan organisms. In this work, the Counter-Flow Micro-Refinery (CFMR) system was developed by employing the novel counter-flow microfiltration principle to enrich (oo)cysts for subsequent analytical purposes. The CFMR system was constructed with multiple counter-flow concentration units that were arranged into two refining levels. By use of different numbers of units, the CFMR offered an adjustable concentration ratio allowing the concentration of 10 L and 100 L to hundreds of mL with no recirculation processing. With spiked samples, recovery of 81.3% oocysts and 86.2% cysts at a variance of < 7% was achieved for concentrations as low as 0.5-100 organisms L(-1). The recovery efficiency showed consistent for a wide range of water turbidities as well as different sample volumes. No significant clogging has been observed in the experiments. Moreover, the refining filter was able to enrich and separate oocysts and cysts in water, simultaneously. This work verifies a feasible solution for recovering C. parvum oocysts and G. lamblia cysts in large-volume surface waters. The refining system has potential to be a high-efficiency monitoring tool when combined with proper analytical detection methods.