Tracking Things That Go Bump in the Pipes

So with that, what exactly is wastewater surveillance?

Yeah, so basically you're using wastewater.

So everything that comes through your pipes from your toilets, your sinks, your showers, all gets dumped into your municipal wastewater systems.

Some folks have private septic systems, and those septic systems, when they're drained, can also get dumped into municipal wastewater systems.

So it all goes down through the pipes into the wastewater system as our influence.

So what is going into the wastewater treatment facilities? And so that's where the sampling, at least in our case, occurs.

We work with our various wastewater treatment facilities for them to collect samples for us on a regular basis.

And you can also collect samples from upstream of those facilities as well.

So if you're tracking some pathogens of concern in a hospital or long-term care facilities or a specific area of a population, you can look at different manholes and sample there.

So there's a lot of flexibility with that.

So pretty much you collect your wastewater sample.

For us, we get them in like 250 milliliter plastic containers and then they get shipped right to us.

And those are... not just filled with wastewater, but sometimes there's storm runoff.

There's environmental and agricultural runoff within these samples as well.

And that's what makes wastewater sometimes so difficult to work with, because when you're introducing all of those different factors into it, sometimes you're not just getting, say, a human source.

In the case of avian influenza, which can be carried in are birds, you can also see that in the wastewater.

If any birds that are migrating are infected with avian influenza, that can get shed into the wastewater system if that runoff penetrates the municipal systems.

And so every so often you can kind of, we actually had a case of that where we had one wastewater facility that had a detection for H5 avian influenza for like one day.

And then the next, it was totally gone.

So we kind of attributed that to a potential environmental contamination, so to say.

And then when we looked at kind of where the wastewater facility was, it was in a very large kind of wetland and agricultural area.

And so that made a lot of sense for us.

But basically, we get these samples and we then try to take the samples, concentrate what's in that sample down.

Because if you're thinking we're trying to isolate viruses, bacteria, and so we need to kind of try to remove all the, I'm going to call it fluff, but very non-technical term, or remove all the fluff, try to remove as many inhibitors as you can from those samples and try to concentrate it down.

and purify it down so at the end you have a pure extract of either your viral RNA or viral DNA if it's a DNA virus or bacteria and just looking for that genomic material at the end.