More than 12 research groups around the world have started analyzing wastewater and whether it contains droppings infected with the emerging coronavirus as a way to estimate the numbers of patients who have not been tested and to see if the virus has returned to spread again in a post-recovery region.
According to the science journal Nature, researchers have found traces of the virus in wastewater at plants in the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden.
The researchers in this study analyze the water that passes through sewage pipes to treatment plants, which is one of the ways through which infectious diseases can be tracked through urine secretions or the residues of the inhabitants of the area under study, where human waste reveals infection with SARS-Cove-2 virus. It is the scientific name for the emerging corona virus.
How do researchers know?
To find out the size of the virus infection among the population through wastewater samples, researchers need to know the amount of viral RNA that is excreted in the stool, and then deduce the infected population from the viral RNA concentrations present in the wastewater samples.
RNA is one of the three major biological molecules essential to all known life forms (along with DNA and proteins), and is necessary in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation, and gene expression.
The difficulty lies in precisely determining or estimating the numbers of infected people, because the extraction processes vary in time from person to person, that is, researchers conduct analysis on representatives of the population and not all of them, so this test can detect the virus at low levels, according to scientists at the Queensland Alliance Research Center Environmental Health Sciences “in Australia.
Early warning
However, the researcher in infectious diseases at the National Institute of Public Health and Environment in the Netherlands, Anna Maria, believes that it is important to carry out routine monitoring and analysis of wastewater, because it is a method that can be used as an early warning tool to alert societies, especially after the elimination of the current corona virus emerging.
Anna says it is likely that the current precautionary measures such as social exclusion and curfews will curb the spread of the epidemic, but after it is announced that it will be eradicated and people start to come out again, another wave of the virus can return, so analyzing sewage and acid Nuclear waste products will be an important tool to warn against the return of the virus.
Anna points out that the institute where you work has previously succeeded in detecting outbreaks of Noro viruses (a dangerous virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea and is easy to catch at all ages), bacteria resistant to antibiotics, poliovirus and measles, by monitoring wastewater.
She added that her research group discovered traces of the Corona virus emerging in sewage at Schiphol Airport in Tilburg, just four days after the Netherlands announced the first case of Covid-19, noting that researchers were planning to extend the search to 12 areas where it had not been announced. For those infected with the emerging coronavirus.
Gertian Medema, a microbiologist at the Water Research Institute in Neuveigen in the Netherlands, says that a single treatment plant captures the droppings of up to more than a million people, which means monitoring and analyzing it may lead to broader estimates of the spread of the Corona virus, and it also gives estimates of a number Those who have not had a test because they do not have symptoms or whose symptoms are mild. ”
Discover before reporting
Medema, one of the research groups working on the study project, added that his group had found viral DNA in the Dutch city of Amersfoort before reporting the infection in the community.
Studies have shown that the SARS-Cove-2 virus can appear in the feces of an infected person within just three days of infection, which is much less time than when symptoms such as fever and shortness of breath begin.
“Early warning, by tracking viruses in wastewater, could lead to containment of the virus outbreak by introducing precautionary measures such as closing the area for a while,” said Tamar Kohn, a virologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
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