North Carolina Wastewater Monitoring Network-Expansion Project
Grant
Overview
abstract
-
Wastewater-based epidemiology is an important screening tool that communities can utilize to detect the presence and persistence of harmful viruses, such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that instigated the COVID-19 global pandemic. Sampling influent wastewater from municipal wastewater treatment plants is a cost-effective mechanism to measure symptomatic and asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 to assess community health at the municipal and/or zip code scale. Routine monitoring of wastewater can elucidate temporal fluctuations in disease prevalence within a community, which can aid public health officials to intervene with community-specific health measures to curtail the spread of COVID-19 or to ease restrictions during times of reduced presence. In addition to community-scale efforts, collaboration between communities can provide high-quality data necessary to interpret, visualize, and map SARS-CoV-2 trends at state or regional scales. This project is an interinstitutional effort led by Dr. Rachel Noble in collaboration with University of North Carolina (UNC) system researchers from universities that include East Carolina University (ECU), North Carolina State University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Wilmington. The goal of this project is to monitor presence of SARS-CoV-2 in influent wastewater collected from treatment plants in at least 15 counties in North Carolina.
date/time interval
awarded by