The Spread Level of Infectious Diseases like COVID-19 Can Also Be Monitored Through Sewage in the Future

Virus and Hand Washing Image [Image Source=Pixabay]

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) announced on the 5th that starting this month, it will begin "wastewater-based infectious disease surveillance" to monitor the extent of community transmission of infectious disease viruses such as COVID-19 through domestic wastewater nationwide.

According to the KDCA, from this month, infectious disease pathogens including coronavirus, norovirus, and influenza virus will be monitored at least once a week, focusing on 64 wastewater treatment plants selected across 17 cities and provinces nationwide. Wastewater-based infectious disease surveillance is a new analytical method that estimates the occurrence of patients in the community by analyzing the amount of virus mixed in domestic wastewater. If a large amount of virus is detected in the wastewater, it can be inferred that there are correspondingly many infected individuals in our society.

Until now, Korea has adopted clinical-based exhaustive surveillance, where medical institutions report confirmed patients and compile statistics. While this method has the advantage of identifying all actual patients, it also has the disadvantage of requiring significant effort and cost. On the other hand, wastewater-based surveillance does not rely on patients or medical institutions, offering greater convenience, and can economically assess the extent of community infection with fewer wastewater tests. It is also capable of monitoring various pathogens such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria beyond COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recognized wastewater-based surveillance as a new infectious disease monitoring technology and actively recommends its use.

The health authorities explained, "When entering phase 2 of the routine management system, exhaustive surveillance will be adjusted to sample surveillance where only some medical institutions report patients, and wastewater surveillance will be applied as a new scientific analytical method to complement sample surveillance."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.