#14 Dutch Israeli Mini-Symposium on Rapid and Accurate Viral Detection and Monitoring in Wastewater (06 Dec 17:00 - 06 Dec 17:00)
Objective: exchange experiences on technologies to detect virus substances in wastewater as a diagnostic tool to monitor pandemics.
Background
Any epidemiological indicator has biases and limitations. Diagnostic testing capacity may be insufficient; hospitalizations lag infections by weeks and do not report on people with mild or asymptomatic disease. Experience with other viral diseases has shown that monitoring sewage for traces of a pathogen enables effective surveillance of entire communities, providing a sensitive signal of whether the pathogen is present in the population and whether transmission is increasing or declining. Researchers around the world are now pursuing the same approach for COVID-19 with the belief that wastewater data can supplement current measures of its prevalence. The coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been widely detected in wastewater in the Netherlands[1]. Scientific results of experiments carried out in the Netherlands, in the USA and in Israel (among other countries) strengthen the evidence that wastewater monitoring could be a powerful tool in tracking the spread of COVID-19 and other viruses. What challenges have been identified and how can we overcome them from a perspective of innovative technology and policy?
[1] To determine if SARS-CoV-2 RNA was present in sewage during the emergence of COVID-19 in The Netherlands, sewage samples of six cities and the airport were tested using four qRT-PCR assays, three targeting the nucleocapsid gene (N1–N3) and one the envelope gene (E). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00357
Program
16:00-16:05 Welcome note
- Jasper van Mastrigt, First Secretary Water & Climate, Netherlands Embassy in Israel
16:05-16:20 Applied wastewater surveillance for SARS CoV2 in Israel, Dr. Itay Bar Or, National Center for Environmental Virology - Head, Laboratory of Environmental Virology, Public Health Services, Israel Ministry of Health, Israel
16:20-16:35 Setting up a national sewage surveillance for COVID-19 and beyond, Dr. Ana Maria de Roda Husman, Head of the environmental department, RIVM Laboratories, Bilthoven, The Netherlands
16:40-16:55 SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern detection and quantification in wastewater, Prof. Ariel Kushmaro, Head of Environmental Biotechnology Lab, Avram and Stella Goldstein-Goren Department of Biotechnology Engineering, Ben Gurion University, Israel
16:55-17:10 High-resolution monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 circulation through sewage surveillance, Frederic Been, Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE), KWR Water Research Institute (KWR), The Netherlands
17:15-17:30 Protecting public health using wastewater derived data, Anne-li Steutel-Maron, KANDO Environment Services, Israel
17:30-17:45 Mobile microbial water testing: Udetect’s opportunities, Marc van Bemmel, Managing Director, Orvion, The Netherlands
17:45-18:00 Discussion