Coverage of our Covid-19 sewage surveillance work

Our involvement in the UK nationwide surveillance programme is highlighted in a news clip on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams (15 July 2020) and in a Feature article in BJM, Sewage monitoring is the UK’s next defence against covid-19, by Chris Baraniuk (15 July 2020). Additionally, our UK work is reported in Con apoyo del CONACYT investigadores crearán herramienta que ayudará a controlar la pandemia en Paraguay from the Consejo National de Cienci y Technologia (13 July 2020). This describes the development of a national sewage SARS-CoV-2 surveillance program for Paraguay.

Nationwide programme for detecting COVID-19 in wastewater

We are one of the teams on the new £1m research programme seeking to establish an early warning of future outbreaks and reduce reliance on costly testing of large populations. The research programme led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), also involves researchers from the universities of Bangor, Bath, Edinburgh, Cranfield, Lancaster, Oxford and Sheffield, plus the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Read the news releases from Newcastle University and UKCEH. This work is an extension to our UK and Spanish SARS-CoV-2 Project.

Also see: 

  • BBC | News | Science & Environment Coronavirus: Testing sewage an ‘easy win’ – nice article, but we did not develop the original method for SARS-CoV-2. We have improved on the previous method to make it more exact and make it more possible to approximate the human population from which it came. 
  • BBC | World Service | listen from 17:56
  • BBC | Radio Newcastle | listen from 3:46:13