{"id":94093,"date":"2020-12-08T12:45:08","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T18:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=94093"},"modified":"2022-01-12T12:53:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T18:53:07","slug":"secret-signals-in-sewage-detect-coronavirus-outbreaks-earlier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/secret-signals-in-sewage-detect-coronavirus-outbreaks-earlier\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret signals in sewage detect coronavirus outbreaks earlier"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marisa Sloan<\/strong>
\nMedill Reports<\/em><\/p>\n

Infectious disease expert Rita Colwell began her career studying fruit fly genetics. Over the next several decades, she added marine and medical microbiology to her repertoire<\/a>, assisted NASA scientists with oceanographic work and became the first woman to direct the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n

Now, like many researchers, she is tackling the challenge of COVID-19.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s 21st century science,\u201d she said. \u201cBy virtue of being shuttled from place to place, I landed right where the cutting-edge research is going on right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colwell\u2019s work draws heavily from years spent tracking the spread of cholera, a bacterial disease caused by contaminated water, in the U.S. and in developing countries. Her success developing inexpensive tracking methods \u2014 along with infiltration methods that curtailed the amount of cholera in the drinking water of rural Bangladeshi villages to nearly half<\/a> \u2014 has made her confident in her ability to accomplish the same with the novel coronavirus.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID-19 is [caused by] a virus and cholera is caused by a bacterium, but nevertheless they are microorganisms and their behaviors seem to be driven quite similarly,\u201d Colwell said. \u201cSo it was very easy to hypothesize and then test these hypotheses based on years of work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The coronavirus is surging in the U.S., surpassing 14 million cases and a quarter of a million deaths this November. Colwell and other researchers believe a technique that identifies remnants of the virus in wastewater could complement existing individual surveillance systems, such as nasal swab and antibody tests, when it comes to informing a community\u2019s public policy decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe virus has a propensity for attaching to a specific receptor site, ACE2, and that receptor seems to be distributed on many of the organs in the human body,\u201d Colwell said. \u201c[That] accounts for the observation that not just the lungs are affected, but also the heart, the liver, the intestines and even the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to a cough and difficulty breathing, many who contract the coronavirus also experience symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhea, a loss of taste or smell, and what has been referred to as \u201cbrain fog<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colwell explained that because the coronavirus is shed directly from the gut, it can be detected in the stool of about half of all people who test positive<\/a> \u2014 even if they are otherwise asymptomatic. That makes wastewater surveillance a powerful tool for monitoring the spread of the virus within a community, particularly younger and under-resourced communities where people with less severe symptoms may not get tested as often as they should.<\/p>\n