Monitoring wastewater can help track diseases, drugs and even explosives
-2 in their faeces. The Dutch team began testing water from Schiphol airport in February 2020. They spotted the virus just as the country’s first cases were being confirmed in hospitals. . By September every one of the Netherlands’ sewage-treatment plants, which cover more than 99% of the population, was being monitored.
Besides simply collecting the data, many countries made it accessible online. That allowed all kinds of organisations to make use of it. University campuses in Arizona used wastewater data to catch infection waves early, for example. Boston Children’s Hospital decided to postpone non-urgent procedures in response to signs that the Omicron variant of covid-19 was surging in local wastewater.
Private organisations are also offering their expertise. Verily, the life-sciences subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, is offering testing facilities to sewage treatment plants in eight American states. Biobot is another American firm, founded explicitly to pursue wastewater epidemiology. It has more than 500 testing sites across the country. It hopes to offer sampling and screening to public-health authorities across America and eventually across the world.
The success of sewage monitoring in tracking covid-19 has boosted interest in other targets, too. Sewage is already monitored in some places for drugs, both legal and otherwise. Biobot started off with the objective of monitoring dosage levels of 30 different painkillers to help better understand America’s opioid crisis.
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