Wastewater-based epidemiology is attracting international attention, and has previously been used to track viruses, including monitoring polio vaccination programs and tracking diseases such as hepatitis, norovirus and influenza
Steve E. Hrudey is Professor Emeritus, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and was the inaugural Associate Dean of the new School of Public Health, University of Alberta. He is Chair of the Research Advisory Group to the Canadian COVID-19 Wastewater Coalition.
Wastewater-based epidemiology is a complementary approach attracting international attention. WBE uses community sewage to represent an entire population to obtain quantitative signals of the prevalence of infection. A 24-hour composite sample of influent sewage represents the collective faecal discharge of an entire urban population on the sewer network - effectively a community-wide swab.
In Canada, the Canadian Water Network, a national not-for-profit knowledge broker, launched the COVID-19 Wastewater Coalition to advance the use of WBE in Canada by facilitating a national proof-of-concept pilot project to rapidly assess the ability to usefully apply WBE and to identify the key elements of WBE that would be needed in a Canadian surveillance program.
WBE cannot replace widespread, ongoing clinical testing, contact-tracing and isolation of infected individuals; knowledge about which individuals are infected will always be needed. But, the inherent capability of a single WBE composite sample to assess the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in the faecal discharge of thousands to millions of individuals warrants careful evaluation.
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