Presence of Norovirus Sequences in Bottled Waters Is Questionable

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Beuret and colleagues reported the detection and identification of noroviruses (NV) in 53 out of 159 samples of mineral water using reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) (1). This sensitive technique is prone to false-positive results, but these can be identified as such by performing sequence analysis of the amplicons. Since the genetic diversity of noroviruses is high, it is unlikely that natural isolates from different sources have identical sequences. The authors claimed that they indeed observed this genetic diversity, suggesting that they were true positives. However, when analyzing their data in detail, we noted that essential information is missing or inconsistent and also discovered several errors which cast serious doubts on this conclusion: