Philly looks for signs of COVID-19 in its raw sewage

Each household in Philadelphia flushes up to 20 gallons of sewage per day down the toilet, amounting to millions of gallons flowing through 3,000 miles of sewer lines toward treatment plants.

And that sewage might help Philadelphia to detect a sudden rise in coronavirus.

The city’s health and water departments have teamed up with Temple University’s Water, Health, and Applied Microbiology Laboratory for a pilot program that will determine if testing Philadelphia’s wastewater “can provide valuable information … [to] better predict the occurrence of COVID-19 in the city’s population,” according to a statement by officials with the two departments.

Heather Murphy, director of the Temple lab and an assistant professor at the school’s College of Public Health, said that although there is an agreement in place, a contract has not been signed, so she could could not yet offer many details.

Broadly, here’s how it works: People can shed the virus in their stool. Though it doesn’t appear that the virus can survive intact through the water treatment process, its RNA, or genetic material, will.

Source: Philly looks for signs of COVID-19 in its raw sewage


The article was originally published here!

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