Canadian scientists watching for new COVID variants in airplane wastewater
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. “Then we’ll be in a position to compare that … to data from the pooled samples to get a sense of does it truly add significant value, what type of additional information does that give us?”What comes out of the airplane toilets is a “wastewater soup” with strains of virus and variants from hundreds of thousands of people, Goodridge said.
That’s when PHAC can look at any unique mutations and compare them to what they’ve observed clinically, such as the variants they’ve found through PCR testing. They can also compare the findings with data they get from other countries about what variants are circulating.
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