Sewage water monitoring can contribute to the detection of sars-cov-2 circulation
Coronaviruses are enveloped, single-stranded RNA viruses, grouped into four main groups: alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. Coronaviruses (CoVs) belong to the Coronaviridae family.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the coronavirus disease COVID-19, a public health emergency worldwide, and Italy is among the most severely affected countries. Sewage water monitoring is one of the key reasons for preventing covid 19.
Sewage water monitoring overview
The first SARS-CoV-2 cases reported in Italy were two Chinese tourists who fell ill in January after flying in from Wuhan, where the pandemic began. These patients were immediately put into isolation, and are not believed to have infected anyone else. The first autochthonous patient was diagnosed one month later in Lombardy, on February 2021. He was a 38-year-old man, from the town of Codogno, 60 km southeast of Milan.
Scientific research was conducted to identify the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Italy earlier than February 2021 by waste water-based epidemiology[1]. Forty sewage samples were analyzed for the study. Samples were collected between 9th October 2019 and 28th February 2020 from five WWTPs (wastewater treatment plants) located in 3 cities of Italy; Milan (20 samples from two distinct plants), Turin (16 samples from two distinct plants), and Bologna (4 samples from one plant). Sewage water monitoring has an impact on spreading covid 19.
Molecular analysis was undertaken with both nested RT-PCR and real-time RT-PCR assays. For nested RT-PCR, SuperScript IV Reverse Transcriptase (Thermo Fisher Scientific) was used to synthesis first-strand cDNA. A newly developed real-time RT- PCR designed with the Primer3 software was used targeting the ORF1ab region of the SARS-CoV-2 genome.
