Wastewater will be analysed to detect coronavirus as an early warning of future outbreaks of the virus.
Scientists believe the virus that causes Covid-19 is present in faeces even when people are asymptomatic and are developing a system for detecting it in wastewater to reduce reliance on mass testing.
The £1 million research programme is being coordinated by the UK Centre for Hydrology & Ecology (UKCEH) and involves researchers at universities in Bangor, Bath, Edinburgh, Cranfield, Lancaster, Newcastle, Oxford and Sheffield, plus the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Dr Andrew Singer of UKCEH and principal investigator of the National Covid-19 Wastewater Epidemiology Surveillance Programme (N-WESP), said the presence of genetic material from the virus in faeces would effectively make wastewater the “’canary in the coal mine’ for Covid-19 and other emerging infectious diseases”.
He explained the research will explore wastewater-based epidemiology – and is based on the analysis of wastewater for markers of infectious disease, illicit drugs or pharmaceuticals in order to better inform public health decisions.
“By sampling wastewater at different parts of the sewerage network, we can gradually narrow an outbreak down to smaller geographical areas, enabling public health officials to quickly target interventions in those areas at greatest risk of spreading the infection,” Singer said.
The project will also determine whether there is a possibility of the virus being transmitted in wastewater or sludge and how it reacts to environmental factors to assess whether current guidance for workers at sewage plants is sufficient.
Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern, one of the programme’s co-investigators, from the University of Bath, said: “Wastewater-based epidemiology offers a promising method for monitoring a pandemic, particularly for infectious diseases such as Covid-19 where asymptomatic cases play a significant role in transmitting the virus. Given the financial and logistical challenges of testing large numbers of people, and then trying to isolate those infected, this represents a potentially low-cost, anonymous and immediate mechanism for predicting local outbreaks and helping to contain the spread of infection.”
Water companies across the UK will be involved in the sampling and research along with Environment Agency, Defra and public health bodies over the course of the project, which runs until October 2021.
The work builds on a similar, recent project led by Newcastle University, working with scientists from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and water industry partners, to develop a way to more exactly quantify the prevalence of the Covid-19 virus across the two regions.
Dr Marcos Quintela-Baluja, research associate at Newcastle University, said: “SARS-CoV-2 is substantially different from commonly monitored viruses in the environment and methods to track it have not yet been standardised. Measuring SARS-CoV-2 in sewage is more difficult than clinical samples, which is why we are focusing on developing accurate methods to guide public health officials.”