Key points:

• The Fluidion® ALERT technology was tested on a four test waters and five natural water matrices and compared in triplicate against the IDEXX Quantitray 2000 reference method on 60 paired samples. In 87% of these, the semi-quantitative risk class matched the expected value.
• The Fluidion® ALERT technology was also evaluated for false positives and false negatives using stocks of six non-target bacteria with and without E.coli. No false positives were found due to non-target bacteria, and the analyzer was able to detect E.coli among each of the non-target bacteria.
• When used as a presence/absence test, the Fluidion ALERT LAB correctly classified 93% of samples using a 1 CFU/100 mL cut-off, 95% of samples using a 10 CFU/100 mL cut-off, and 98% of samples using a 100 CFU/100 mL cut-off.
• Fluidion ALERT Lab tends to overestimate rather than underestimate the risk, which can be attributed to its ability to fully quantify bacterial aggregates on particles (which traditional methods cannot do).
• The ALERT Lab was found to be user friendly, demonstrating ease of execution and use, ease of interpretation of results, and low risk of contamination between samples and users.