Guidelines to advise on the correct practices to control legionella bacteria in water systems exist worldwide. Suppressing bacteria levels does substantially reduce the possibility of an outbreak of this often fatal disease. Guidelines recommend introducing a monitoring and control program. This program includes the testing of cooling tower waters with dipslides on a regular basis.

A full range of dipslides is available for semiquantitative determination of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria populations in industrial and recreational waters. Dipslide accuracy is limited due to the small sample size, but if used correctly and incubated at a constant temperature using the Lovibond^® dipslide incubator, they are excellent for trend analysis and can give an early indication of bacteria proliferation.