Contents I. Introduction
Disease-causing pathogens continue presenting enormous global health problems, especially due to their easy transmittance to people via water supply systems. Although incidents of massive waterborne microbial disease outbreak are relatively rare in developed countries, a low level of pathogen contamination can cause severe illness or even death for people in poor health [1]. Conventional methods to disinfect microbial pathogens in water and wastewater treatment processes include chlorination, ozonation, and UV radiation [2]. However, it has been widely recognized that the performance and efficiency of these techniques are still variable and remain uncertain, thereby sometimes result in treatment failure and lead to waterborne disease outbreaks [3],[4]. Furthermore, current monitoring methods to detect microbial pathogens have practical limitations and difficulties that are mostly related to the time involved in isolating pathogens and with the accuracy of the detection [5],[6]. Therefore, more reliable water quality control techniques for microbial contaminants are greatly in need to prevent such microbial risks.
