Recovery of indigenous enteroviruses from raw and digested sewage sludges.

We examined different types of raw sewage sludge treatment, including consolidation, anaerobic mesophilic digestion with subsequent consolidation, and aerobic-thermophilic digestion. Of these, the most efficient reduction in infectious virus titer was achieved by mesophilic digestion with subsequent consolidation, although a pilot-scale aerobic-thermophilic digester was extremely time effective, producing sludges with similarly low virus titers in a small fraction of the time. Although none of the treatments examined consistently produced a sludge with undetectable virus levels, mesophilic digestion alone was found to be particularly unreliable in reducing the levels of infectious virus present in the raw sludge.