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A group of scientists have detected genetic material from SARS-CoV-2 in untreated wastewater samples collected in April 2020 from two wastewater treatment plants in Louisiana, USA.
Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) is a process where the spread of illness in human populations is monitored by analyzing wastewater.
It’s been used to track the spread of polio and norovirus infections. Many groups around the world are focusing on developing methods to accommodate WBE to track COVID-19. Utilizing these methods, SARS-CoV-2 was detected in municipal wastewater from Australia, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.
This is the very first report of detection of this virus in wastewater from North America.
Samples were collected monthly between January and April 2020 from 2 anonymous wastewater treatment plants, which serve inhabitants of 244,627 (WWTP A) along with 45,694 (WWTP B) respectively.
The scientists attempted to recover SARS-CoV-2 from these trials by one of two methods: ultrafiltration (filtering samples through exceptionally fine filters to collect the virus) or adsorption elution (passing the sample through a membrane which binds the virus, then collecting the virus from massaging it out).
The amount of virus recovered was determined by reverse transcription-quantitative PCR, the conventional approach to check for SARS-CoV-2.
From a total of 15 trials, the scientists found SARS-CoV-2 in just two samples. The viruses have been found in samples that were processed by ultrafiltration, but not at the samples targeted by adsorption-elution.Moreover, the virus was only detected in untreated waste, although not at some of the treated wastewater samples – suggesting that standard wastewater processing could be sufficient to remove and/or destroy the virus.
In the end, the virus was only found in samples collected in April (WWTP A on April 29 and WWTP B on April 8). Within the sampling interval, the whole number of confirmed cases in the areas served from the wastewater treatment plants has been highest in this month.
The scientists concluded that ultrafiltration was the superior method for retrieval of the virus, but other things might interfere with the detection of the virus.
However, further tests are needed on larger sample dimensions to comprehend the limitations of the method, and also to compare it to other methods now being tested for the same function. Generally, for the WBE of COVID-19, greater virus immersion techniques and virus detection techniques are required.
Assistant Professor Kitajima is currently involved in several of studies associated with applying WBE to monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s collaborated with a variety of scientists and research teams across the world in this effort, and was a part of the group that initially discovered SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater in Japan.
Hokkaido University
Sherchan, S. P., et al. (2020) First detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater in North America: A study in Louisiana, USA. Science of the Total Environment. doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140621.
