The Water Drop™: Episode 3

Legionella Testing: Culture vs. qPCR

Legionella testing is incredibly important in hospitals, senior living facilities, hospitality, really anywhere that has a domestic water system or centralized water system that may have immunocompromised people occupying the building, has been vacant for a period of time. It's really important to do routine Legionella testing.

For Legionella testing there is the old gold standard, which is culture.

Culture takes 7 to 10, to sometimes 14 days to get results back, but facilities can't wait that long to get results back. The most innovative way to test is qPCR and IWC's ULTRA qPCR offering that differentiates live from dead bacteria, speciates, gives more detail than a typical qPCR test and is very, very effective with results available in as little as 24 hours.

When you're talking about the possibility of Legionella being in your building, you don't have that kind of time. And as we all see from COVID and how much qPCR really played a role in quick results, it's the same thing in the environmental world. So, to be able to determine if Legionella is present and to have those results in 24 hours is priceless, because then you can react.

Optimize Your Testing with the Quickest Results!