Our theatres send us water samples for legionella testing and they are transported in a cooler box with ice packs that have been stored at -80oC. Would this not kill any bacteria? Or is legionella testing done via PCR?

 

I'm BB/haem trained so just curious as I get requests out of hours for freezer packs and I'm not entirely comfortable with the process.

Anyone?

Our waters come in at room temp, right after collection and are set up then. If they come in on the evening shift they may sit refrigerated overnight. I'm not sure why your people transport them so cold, as it would take much longer for the cultures to grow from what viable organisms remained if they were frozen ( one article suggested up to 29 days vs a week). I'm supposing the time elapsed is long enough that they want to make sure they stay refrigerated, but not frozen?

We used to get water samples for this as well. However, we discontinued this practice. To test water one needs filtering apparatus to run a large amount of water through, then culture the filter pad to get an ID and colony count. To culture 10, 50 or 100mls of a water sample by inoculating with a loop or just taking .5 ml of sample is not adequate. They now send them to another lab that does this testing correctly. Environmental lab I believe.

we don't test as we don't have filters and equipment to do the filtering.