Need a better way to check for Coronavirus?
How about wastewater treatment plants?
Analysing wastewater—used water that goes through the drainage system to a treatment facility—is one way that researchers can track infectious diseases that are excreted in urine or faeces, such as SARS-CoV-2.
One treatment plant can capture wastewater from more than one million people, says Gertjan Medema, a microbiologist at KWR Water Research Institute in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. Monitoring effluent at this scale could provide better estimates for how widespread the coronavirus is than testing, because wastewater surveillance can account for those who have not been tested and have only mild or no symptoms, says Medema, who has detected SARS-CoV-2 genetic material—viral RNA—in several treatment plants in the Netherlands. “Health authorities are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
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