Wastewater treatment is a two-step process. Water that comes out the tap goes through a water purification plant beforehand and becomes wastewater after it is used. “All of the wastewater from Stillwater, well, where does it go? We don’t just dump it in a river,” Hoff said. “Stillwater has a wastewater treatment plant where, through microbiology, there are processes to make that water safe to dump in the environment.” Samples of that water could be regularly taken and tested for the presence of RNA molecules using very sensitive tools. “One can measure wastewater for specific types of RNA,” Hoff said. “In this case, we would use the RNA from the coronavirus. “I think the issues now are mainly technical. How does one get enough sensitivity? And how can one accurately convert a reading into how many virus molecules are in a gallon of water? And what does that mean for Stillwater?” At the very least, the team knows trends can be measured, Hoff added. He was hoping to have the system working just before the fall semester began. “We would then have some sort of baseline of what the current water load of virus particles is,” Hoff said. “And then one could keep an eye on it [for trends going up or down].” Ramachandran is one of the leaders in Oklahoma’s COVID-19 testing efforts, so he is already familiar with the processes. “There are no special tools,” Ramachandran said. “We will be using the same PCR protocols that we use for testing clinical samples.” The only difference will be clinical samples usually have a higher concentration of virus, he added. “Water samples will have to be filtered and concentrated to improve detection probability of viruses,” Ramachandran said. “Since we are already testing thousands of samples, a few additional water samples are not going to affect our workflow.” This will be especially helpful to monitor COVID-19. The issue is in how the virus acts. “If a virus is incredibly lethal, the risk that it spreads typically is pretty low because everybody dies and the virus dies out,” Hoff said. “But if the lethality is high enough to be a big problem, but not enough that it wipes out the whole village instantly, so to speak, infection starts. And if it’s highly infectious, then it’s the most dangerous.” The last pandemic comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis was the Spanish flu. There is good news today compared to that outbreak, though. Currently we are doing roughly 20 times better at controlling this virus than we did the Spanish flu, Hoff said. “This wastewater testing is to hold on to those gains, basically, to keep the number of people who will get seriously sick or die of this virus as low as possible,” Hoff said. “We hope that this can be a warning system.” Dr. Akhilesh Ramachandran, an associate professor in the Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab in the College of Veterinary Medicine. OSU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 3
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