Occurrence of Salivirus in Sewage and River Water Samples in Karaj, Iran

Salivirus is a newly discovered virus which seems to be related to acute gastroenteritis in children. Salivirus may infect susceptible children by fecal-oral route after exposure to contaminated water. The present study aims to evaluate the occurrence and quantity of Salivirus in treated and untreated sewage water and river water samples collected in the city of Karaj, Iran by reverse transcription-quantitative PCR assay. A total of 50 samples were collected from environmental waters containing 22 treated and untreated sewage water in volume of 11 and 28 river water samples in volume of 51 were included in this study. After viral RNA extraction, the Real-time PCR was performed to amplify the 5'UTR sequence of Salivirus genome and viral load was assessed. Out of the 50 samples tested, the Salivirus genomic RNA was identified in 5/12 (41.6%) of treated and 3/10 (30%) of untreated sewage samples and in 8/28 (28.5%) of river water samples. The maximum viral load was 4.8x10(6) copies/l in treated sewage water sample in September and the lower viral load was 4x10(5) copies/l related to treated sewage water taken in December. This is the first report of Salivirus occurrence in the environmental waters in Iran. The viral prevalence of Salivirus in each of the three sets of tested samples was within low to moderate in range.