On Friday, Vancouver International Airport will join Toronto's Pearson International Airport in taking samples of fecal matter from airplane toilets to identify what coronavirus variants and subvariants passengers and crew might be bringing into Canada.
As Canadian public health officials question China's transparency in sharing its COVID-19 surveillance information, scientists are stepping up airplane wastewater testing to try to get an early warning of potential new variants.
The Public Health Agency of Canada has actually been working with university scientists to test wastewater from arriving airplanes, as well as terminal buildings, at Pearson since January 2022. The waste from planes coming from both domestic and international destinations has been all mixed together, said Lawrence Goodridge, a University of Guelph professor who is one of the researchers.
Then in the coming weeks, the researchers will start a pilot study similar to Pearson's toseparately test samples from airplanes coming from China and Hong Kong, Boudreau said. There has been an explosion of COVID-19 illness after the Chinese government lifted strict restrictions. In a news release issued on Dec. 31, PHAC said China has not provided enough "epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data" on those cases."What we're doing here is to take one step further and to look to see whether we can get more precision by doing direct airplane sampling," Poliquin said.
Genomic sequencing allows scientists to not only find variants and subvariants they're already familiar with, but also see anything that looks unusual or new. As of Wednesday, the agency was aware of 21 cases of XBB.1.5 in Canada and said it is "currently considered to be only detected sporadically," it said in an email.Where else is wastewater testing used?
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