The U.S. EPA has issued a $1 million research grant to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for research to improve wastewater monitoring for infectious diseases, such as COVID-19.
Chris Frey, assistant administrator to the EPA Office of Research and Development, said wastewater monitoring is a crucial component for tracking human health concerns across the country.
“As research by EPA and others have demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater monitoring is an invaluable approach for detecting and tracking infectious disease and ultimately protecting public health,” Frey said in a press release. “This forward-looking EPA research grant will improve understanding of the presence of disease-causing pathogens in U.S. communities and support public health officials as they make decisions during pandemics.”
The grant is awarded to the Principal Investigator Thanh H. (Helen) Nguyen at U of I, and the research locations will include Urbana, Illinois; Gainesville, Florida; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C. Nguyen’s abstract for the research is as follows.
Future pandemics will require that wastewater surveillance be deployed quickly and effectively. While a pandemic or epidemic is global or national, pathogen transmission is local. We will develop a hierarchical sentinel site identification system based on accurate predictions of infection risk levels at various spatial resolution levels. We hypothesize that identifying wastewater sentinel sites for pathogen monitoring can be developed based on integrated analysis of data streams for weather, human mobility, healthcare, civil infrastructure, population density, socio-demographics, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. We also hypothesize that the sentinel sites should be identified hierarchically from the county, city/town/village, to building level depending on pathogen transmission characteristics.
The EPA press release notes that the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for tools to monitor the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. Innovative research is needed to help create effective wastewater sampling networks to allow for early detection of the spread of infection from national to local levels.
Additionally, the data collected during wastewater sampling needs to be made available in a format that can be readily used by public health agencies nationwide to address pandemics. The research awarded under this grant will improve how wastewater surveillance systems are used to detect pathogens in community populations.
Using funding from this grant, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plan to develop a system to rank locations where wastewater monitoring should take place to detect disease-causing pathogens. The research will focus on improving the accuracy of predictions using an integrated analysis of data including weather, human mobility, health care, infrastructure, population density, socio-demographics and information from the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Results from the project are expected to include a transmission forecasting model for wastewater monitoring, a tested system to identify optimal monitoring sites, and a secure platform for data storage and analysis to provide actionable wastewater monitoring information to public health officials for pandemic management. Results will be communicated to public health officials through the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), which is collaborating with the grantee on this project. Other collaborators include researchers at the University of Florida and Portland State University in Oregon.
Read more about the research project on the U.S. EPA website.
