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Over 71 million people are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) worldwide, and approximately 400,000 global deaths result from complications of untreated chronic HCV. Pan-genomic direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) have recently become widely available and feature high cure rates in less than 12 weeks of treatment. The rollout of DAAs is reliant on diagnostic tests for HCV RNA to identify eligible patients with viremic HCV infections. Current PCR-based HCV RNA assays are restricted to well-resourced central laboratories, and there remains a prevailing clinical need for expanded access to decentralized HCV RNA testing to provide rapid chronic HCV diagnosis and linkage to DAAs in outpatient clinics. This paper reports a rapid, highly accurate, and minimally instrumented assay for HCV RNA detection using reverse transcription recombinase polymerase amplification (RT-RPA). The assay detects all HCV genotypes with a limit of detection of 25 copies per reaction for genotype 1, the most prevalent in the United States and worldwide. The clinical sensitivity and specificity of the RT-RPA assay were both 100% when evaluated using 78 diverse clinical serum specimens. The accuracy, short runtime, and low heating demands of RT-RPA may enable implementation in a point-of-care HCV test to expand global access to effective treatment via rapid chronic HCV diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a future hydrogen economy, harvesting water from H2 fuel cells and other devices should be considered as a by-product of their operation. We hypothesize that the water quality produced by modern fuel cells is higher than typical tap waters and complies with US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) regulations. Water samples were collected from six different fuel cells (FCs) operated at research centers across the US, and their constituents were measured. The water quality parameters were below the maximum contaminant levels except for zinc, lead and antimony, which may be related to plumbing or FC material leaching. To investigate the yield of water from FCs, water to energy production ratios were modeled. With 85% capture of exhaust water, an FC operating to meet daily energy consumption needs of a typical US household would produce ~16 L of water. This is nearly the volume of internal human consumption of water, but far less than the ~410 L/capita/d of total potable water demand which accounts for all uses of water. In a nationwide hydrogen economy, where all energy consumed comes from hydrogen, over 4.9 billion m3 of high quality water per year would be produced as by-products of hydrogen usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]