Journal Club: “Initial Mapping of the New York City Wastewater Virome”

While not about COVID19 directly, this paper “Initial Mapping of the New York City Wastewater Virome” has implications for the many many folks looking at SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater these days.  This work is looking at all the viruses in the wastewater system and is one of relatively few metagenomic studies out there that focuses on …

#COVID19 Journal Club: “SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary municipal sewage sludge as a leading indicator of COVID-19 outbreak dynamics”

Yet another wastewater surveillance study for SARS-CoV-2.  Seems to be the hot topic these days.  This is a great paper by Jordan Peccia and colleagues.  They collected wastewater samples over the course of a couple months and saw how well those correlated with testing data and hospital admissions.  Not only were the correlations extremely high, …

#COVID19 Journal Club: COVID-19: “The environmental implications of shedding SARS-CoV-2 in human faeces”

We’ve posted recently a few times (here, here, and here) about the idea of doing wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 (and we’ve just submitted a grant on this as well).  In those cases the focus is on detecting RNA from the virus and using that to guide community health decisions such as when to end (or …

#COVID19 Preprint Journal Club: “Temporal detection and phylogenetic assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in municipal wastewater”

Wastewater detection for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be a hot topic these days (full disclosure, we recently submitted a grant recently to jump on this same bandwagon).   This study “Temporal detection and phylogenetic assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in municipal wastewater” took place in Montana (USA).  This study goes a bit further than the previous one by genome …

#COVID19 Preprint Journal club: “SARS-CoV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases”

Moving from hospitals into environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2, here looking at detection in wastewater.  “SARS-CoV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases“.  The title really says it all here… it’s a great demonstration of the utility of wastewater surveillance for this kind of question, although quantification is much harder than just …

New wastewater anammox project

So our lab appears to be digging deeper and deeper into the world of wastewater treatment, especially the process of removing ammonia from wastewater in the final steps.  I’ve posted before about our sample collection from a pilot wastewater treatment facility.   We’ve been sequencing those samples like crazy… we’ve thrown Nanopore, Illumina, and PacBio data …

Where does privacy end and epidemiology begin? How much should we use surveys of what is in sewers and how far up the line should they go?

Question of the day. Where do we draw the line in terms of privacy when sampling sewer systems?  I have had some major concerns about microbiome studies using sewer system samples in the past.  And of course people are trying to use sewer system studies to look at all sorts of other epidemiology related data. …