Novel Coronavirus Testing

Within weeks of arriving on the world stage, novel coronavirus has arranged to encircle the earth, leaving disease, mortality, and financial destruction in its colossal wake. One of the central challenges facing health professionals and the medical society has been testing for the severe virus on enough full scale.

A unique approach to controlling the novel coronavirus (as well as other severe pathogens and biochemical agents) is being created and developed. Known as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), the method mines sewage units for vital clues about human health. It can probably know levels of coronavirus disease at both a local and global scale.

Current Measurement Capacity

Ultimately, WBE holds the hope of near real-time monitoring of illness outbreaks, resistant microbes, levels of medication use or health signs of diabetes, obesity, and other maladies.

In a supplementary study, ASU researchers Rolf Halden and Olga Hart analyze what can and cannot be measured when tracking SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater. They highlight the economic benefits of the new approach over traditional infection testing and epidemiological monitoring.

“Our outcomes show that particular reliance on testing of people is too slow, cost-prohibitive, and in most places, impossible, given our current measurement capacity,” Halden states. “Yet, when led by a population-wide screening of wastewater, the task grows less daunting and more flexible.”

Hart is the lead author of the brand-new research and a researcher in the Biodesign Center for Health Engineering. Halden, who directs the center, also is a professor of engineering in the Fulton School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment and author of the 2020 book Environment.

Coronavirus Testing

Wastewater-based epidemiology holds the potential to break the coronavirus testing logjam in many advanced nations like the U.S. Still, and it could also be a valuable tool for gathering health data in poor regions likely to bear the brunt of the pandemic.

Currently, the U.S. features the most extensive national and international WBE network and sample repository, known as the Human Health Observatory (HHO) at ASU. Recently, SARS-CoV-2 was added to a range of health signs subject to constant tracking by the HHO since May 2008.

Halden’s system boasts high sensitivity, with the potential to know the name of a single infected individual among 100 to 2 million persons. To achieve this, wastewater people are selected for the presence of nucleic acid parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The RNA genomes are increased through a method known as reverse-transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT qPCR).

Current Research

The WBE strategy involves first transcribing coronavirus RNA into complementary DNA (cDNA) by the reverse transcriptase enzyme, then amplifying the resultant DNA to improve signal exposure. Sequencing methods are used to settle the viral presence in wastewater examples.

“We can see in one go monitor an entire community for presence of the new coronavirus,” Hart replied.

In the current research, investigators create samples in Tempe, Ariz., for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Their work draws on computational analysis and modeling and projections of past, present, and future epidemic hotspots.