MODERN WATER14 May 2020 17:55
And for those who cannot find it
* Sewage monitoring could track virus flare-ups
* Sampling would help estimate number of infected
* Could reduce need for mass testing
By Kate Kelland
LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - The science of sewage
surveillance could be deployed in countries across the world to
help monitor the spread of national epidemics of COVID-19 while
reducing the need for mass testing, scientists say.
Experts in the field - known as wastewater epidemiology -
say that as countries begin to ease pandemic lockdown
restrictions, searching sewage for signs of the SARS-CoV-2
coronavirus could help them monitor and respond to flare-ups.
Small early studies conducted by scientific teams in The
Netherlands, France, Australia and elsewhere have found signs
that the COVID-19-causing virus can be detected in sewage.
"Most people know that you emit lots of this virus through
respiratory particles in droplets from the lungs, but what's
less well known is that you actually emit more small virus
particles in faeces," said Davey Jones, a professor of
environmental science at Britain's Bangor University.
This suggests that on a wider scale, sewage sampling would
be able to estimate the approximate number of people infected in
a geographic area without having to test every person.
"Every time a person becomes infected with COVID-19, they
start shedding virus into the sewer system," Jones said. "We're
using that (knowledge) and tracking people's toilet movements."
The practice has been used to monitor health threats and
viral diseases before.
It's a crucial tool in the global fight to eradicate polio,
and scientists in Britain and elsewhere also use it to monitor
antibiotic resistance genes from livestock farming.
"Wastewater epidemiology has been part of monitoring of
polio infection across the world, so it's not completely new,"
said Alex Corbishley, a veterinary scientist at the Roslin
Institute in Edinburgh who is running a three-month pilot
project to track SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater in Scotland. "But it's
never really been applied to an outbreak in this way."
"The idea here is that you could potentially use this as a
relatively cheap, but much more importantly, scaleable, way of
saying 'there's X amount of transmission' in a community."
NOT INFECTIOUS
Scientists conducting initial COVID-19 sewage studies in
Europe and Australia stress that what they are picking up is not
live, infectious virus, but dead particles or fragments of the
virus's genetic material that are not infectious.
In a pilot trial in Queensland, Australia, scientists were
able to detect a gene fragment of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage from two
wastewater treatment plants.
In the Netherlands, sewage epidemiologists acted ahead of
the COVID-19 outbreak there and took samples from seven cities
and a major airport in February and March.
While they found no detectable virus three weeks before the
first COVID-19 case was detected, by March 5 -
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