Tag Archives: national surveillance

Finalist for Newcastle University’s Engagement and Place Awards 2021

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Happy to announce our involvement in co-developing the UK National Wastewater-based Epidemiology Surveillance Network has been short-listed in Newcastle University’s Engagement and Place Awards 2021 in the Engaging with Policy and Practice category. We are pleased to share the spotlight with our colleagues in Environmental Engineering for their work on BEWISe (Biological Engineering: Wastewater Innovation at Scale) in the Engaging for Economic Benefit category. The engagement summaries for all finalist are described here.

The winners will be announced Wednesday, 26 May 2021. The online award ceremony hosted by our Vice-Chancellor and President and our Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engagement and Place Is open to all. You can register here, we hope you can join us.

Coverage of our Covid-19 sewage surveillance work

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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

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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